Rule

by Rowenna Miller

  “A little skiff,” Polly confirmed. “Who would have guessed that the most powerful weapon on the seas would be borne by Admiral Merhaven’s personal sailing vessel?” She laughed, white teeth showing like pearls.

  “Is it the same?” I asked. “As before, as at Hazelwhite? The physical disorientation, the illness? Or are they trying something different?”

  “Can’t you tell?”

  “No,” I said. “Perhaps if I studied their methods more, but I’m no expert in their version of casting.” I was barely an expert in my own, I felt, still experimenting and testing, failing as often as I succeeded.

  “Interesting. I don’t know.” She essayed a sly glance in my direction. “I don’t suppose the promise of studying with the Serafans, learning their methods, would entice you any more than what I’ve already offered?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Pity. Galitha needs someone like you, you know. The world is changing. I can’t imagine any country can ignore casting any longer, after what you’ve done. Even Kvyset,” she added lightly.

  I ignored her, and pinpointed the space where a single sail, stowed but gleaming white, bobbed in the harbor. I couldn’t see the deck of the ship itself, and of course couldn’t see the instruments, the musicians, or the amplifying device they had used on us. It was far away, much farther than I had ever been from a successful target.

  Still, the cloud of curse magic was clear, and had a clear source. I flicked a bit of charm magic from the ether, and drove it toward the curse magic. If I could bisect it, as I had done during the Battle of Rock’s Ford, perhaps I could lessen its effects on the city, perhaps even divert it entirely. I pushed it onward, farther, but sweat began to bead on my forehead. The hard-driven line began to unravel and spread back into the ether.

  I was out of range, and utterly incapable of altering the Serafan casting.

  Polly watched me with a quirked eyebrow. “You tried, didn’t you?”

  I didn’t bother replying.

  “You did! Would that I could see it, could see what you see.” She met my eyes. “Yes, I am a bit jealous. I’m allowed—you can not only see but manipulate the strings of fortune binding the world.” She looked back toward the harbor, the minute white sail her only indication of the source of the Serafan magic. “It won’t be long, I imagine, until they capitulate, and if they don’t—well, they’ll be easy enough to rout.”

  “You have to win on the field first,” I said, cold fear trickling through my confident words. The riflemen were probably picking off our officers even as I spoke. We had counted on reinforcements from the city, for the gates to open and Niko’s men to flood the field—but only when we had successfully gained enough of the field for them to take that gamble. “You have to breach the walls.”

  “We will,” Polly said. “Eventually.”

  53

  DESPITE POLLY’S INSISTENCE THAT THE ROYALIST VICTORY WAS near at hand, the sun crested past noon and the guns didn’t abate. She grew tired of watching the harbor, where a cloud of curse she couldn’t see sustained an assault on the city, and directed me to return with her for luncheon.

  “You’re being absurdly polite to a hostage,” I said as we returned to the tent that I now realized were her campaign accommodations.

  “I’m merely treating you as I might a high-ranking officer.” Polly called for Dicey, who hurried to her mistress with a flagon of cool water and a pair of glasses. “Lunch please. Some of the smoked cheese, and the leek pastry, if there’s any left.”

  “Someone here is making leek pastry?” I snorted. “Not exactly eating as a common soldier, are you?”

  “Dicey is worth her weight in gold. She can cook almost anything using just a brazier.” Polly poured me a glass of water, and Dicey returned with a platter of cold ham, cheese, and half of a galette that smelled heavily of onion.

  I hesitated over the plate Dicey served me, and Polly laughed. “I won’t poison you. That would be very stupid.” She broke off a piece of cheese with her delicate fingers. “Think of it our way. You have to either join us—yes, I know, that’s very unlikely, thank you for disappointing me yet again—or be fairly tried and hanged. As a criminal. Otherwise we’re the horrid war criminals who murdered a prisoner of war with a leek tart.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, nibbling at a corner of pastry. Polly was right—Dicey was a culinary genius. But I wasn’t hungry, not with the echo of the guns and the dark magic seeping through the city.

  There was little point in conversing with Polly. I was not going to change her mind, nor would she change mine, like parallel rivers running close but never coming to a confluence. A battle raged without us, all the words and pamphlets and arguments and laws Galitha could produce coming down to shot and steel, to bloody ground yielded and gained.

  “Do you ever get tired of it?” I murmured.

  “What?” Polly set her fork down next to an empty plate. I wasn’t sure how she managed to eat, but I’d learned that the nobility of Galitha had stomachs of iron when it came to managing their nerves. They could pretend blithe contentment at the buffet in the midst of a firestorm.

  “Waiting. Waiting for this battle to end, waiting for the council to vote on a measure, waiting for someone else to do something when you’d damn well rather just do it yourself?”

  Polly smiled, faint but honest. “All the time. It’s why I’m here instead of holed up in Serafe with my mother and Jonamere. At least here I can do something. Maybe not as much as you,” she said with residual spitefulness fading, “but something. It was my idea to remove you from the battle.”

  “Well, thank you very much for that.”

  “Come now, you can’t blame me. Father and the others still don’t, I think, appreciate just how much you could do. How much I can presume you were doing.”

  “And you do?”

  “I speak better Serafan than they do, and I understand the magicians they’ve brought here when they say that what you’ve done is beyond their abilities.” She smiled as I started. “Yes, they admit as much. They want to know how you’ve done it.”

  I fell still, forcing my face into an impassive mask. I had feared this. “It’s not something I can teach,” I hedged.

  “I don’t know your abilities as a teacher, but their ability to learn is not dependent on that. It’s something you could write about, something you could record. Something others could study.” A slow shadow of understanding crept over her face. “You’re afraid of it, aren’t you? Of what you can do. Are you afraid of being powerful?”

  The question slapped me like a dash of cold water. It was incisive, reaching past the recent months of necessity and into who I was, a seamstress, a charm caster, a Pellian girl trying to make a name for herself in Galitha City. I had never imagined power for myself. “I’m afraid of what this can do,” I answered instead, “in the wrong hands.”

  “As were the men who invented gunpowder, too, I’m sure, and cannon, and fast ships. I imagine if we trace it far enough back, the first man to whittle a blade from flint said, ‘Ah, but can I trust all of my neighbors with one of these?’”

  “And it takes very little study to prove his concerns correct.”

  “Not unfounded, no. But impossible to avoid. The world marches on, Sophie, and either you can accept the power that comes with what you’ve discovered, or someone else, someday, will.”

  Shouts from the hilltop overlooking the city interrupted us. A runner, then another, raced past Polly’s tent, and she followed them. I began to stand, but a man in the brown uniform of a City Guard stopped me. A member of the Royalist army now, and utilizing his skills perhaps gained in the prisons of the Stone Castle to guard me.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t say,” he said, with a slight shake of his head that told me he was reading nothing good for the Royalists in the bustle in the center of the encampment. “You just stay put there. And don’t…” He clamped his mouth shut.

  “Do
n’t try any of my witchcraft on you?” My mouth twisted into a wry grin. “But how would you know?”

  “Now then! You give me any reason to think it’s so, and I’ll—” He pressed his lips together against the unsavory thought of shooting a woman point-blank. “I’ve a musket right here.” He held it out as though to prove his point.

  I sat down, weary. “I have nothing to gain in harming you,” I said. There was a time I would have said that I wouldn’t, that I couldn’t harm him. That time was gone.

  He positioned himself nervously by the flap of the tent. Dicey stepped toward me, and I started. “Are you done with that?” she asked, pointing to my plate.

  “Yes, I—it was very good, but I have no appetite, I’m sorry.”

  “I haven’t, either,” she said. She had freckles across her sun-tanned nose, and bright blue eyes. “Do you want tea? I’ve ginger tea, if your stomach is all knots.”

  “Thank you, but no.” I sighed. “May I ask—why are you here?”

  She shrugged, rattling the plate of uneaten leek tart. “You mean why am I with the Royalists and not the Reformists?”

  “Or with anyone at all, yes.”

  “I was in Galitha City when the Red Caps staged their coup.” She swept a few loose crumbs off the table. “We—my family—wanted nothing to do with it. Didn’t want that kind of death on our doorsteps.”

  “I can understand that,” I said, hoping I sounded less jaded than I felt.

  “But it came anyway, and my brother got caught up in the street fighting. Took a blow to the head—we don’t know who did it, and I don’t care. He doesn’t, either. Never woke up. He died a few days later.” She straightened. “The Red Caps and the Reformists after them can’t keep the peace. Can’t keep things from turning to riot and rot. When Niko Otni and his horde took over the city, I fled. Plenty of people did. Plenty of us came here. We’ve been safe here.”

  I hesitated. There were a thousand arguments I could make—Kristos’s impassioned appeals for basic liberty, Theodor’s dogged determination on the importance of a rule of law, Niko’s confidence in the commoners, my own realization that stability could only be bought so long, and at a high price. But I found I couldn’t voice any of them. Not now.

  “I’m sorry about your brother. I hope your family is safe.”

  “Damn your eyes!” Polly sailed back into the tent, the guard following her, bayonet fixed. “What did you do?”

  “Me?” I stood, reflexively backing away under the scrutiny of a bayonet pointed at me.

  “In the harbor. Whore’s ass, I shouldn’t have shown you, you did something, but I can’t figure how—”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, forcing my voice to be as level as I could, even as I quaked with fear under Polly’s anger and the guard’s steel. Dicey had wisely slipped away.

  “How did you manage to send the message, that’s what I don’t understand.”

  “I truly,” I repeated, “do not know what’s happened.”

  Polly watched me a long moment, and finally made up her mind. “You don’t, do you?” She gestured to the guard. “Come with me.”

  54

  WE CLIMBED THE LOW HILL AGAIN, OUT OF VIEW OF THE BATTLEFIELD but with eyes on the harbor, and I knew immediately what had infuriated Polly.

  Black smoke rose from the harbor, thick and curling, and under it, flames lapped what rigging and sails I could see. I strained to make out the Serafan casters’ ship, but I couldn’t pick it out in the hazy chaos of destruction.

  “Mercy,” I whispered. For once, I was thankful I couldn’t see more clearly. Sailors and marines were probably leaping from ships for their lives, caught in a crushing melee of broken hulls and flames.

  “No, you didn’t know.” Polly swallowed. “Tell me, is the casting still holding over the city?”

  She had no way of knowing. The Serafan casters had all been deployed, on the field and on that ship in the harbor. I answered honestly anyway. “No. It’s gone. It doesn’t last past casting it, not long anyway.”

  “So the city is freed from its effects.”

  “If my experience with the ‘effects’ are any indication, yes.” I exhaled, still shaky, still very aware of the cruel steel of the bayonet mere yards away from me. “How did it happen?” I ventured to ask.

  “How?” Polly’s voice raised a pitch. “Fire ships, that’s how. Whatever pitiful excuse you have for a navy managed—we should have known. It was a dreadful mistake to mass our navy here. Damn it all.” Her voice seethed with anger but her body remained motionless, her face stone, watching the destruction of the strength of the Galatine navy.

  Annette. The thought soared, and then crashed into itself, faced with the death and pain surely overtaking Galitha City’s harbor. It didn’t matter that those men would have had me killed in an instant; I couldn’t rejoice over their deaths. But Annette! Against the massed Royalist navy we had held out some hope she could delay or complicate their retreat, but she had managed something far more effective.

  A roar rolled from the battlefield and across the Royalist encampment, rising up the hill. Free of the curse casting, Niko’s men within the city had begun their foray from within the walls. That meant—my eyes went wide at the thought—that even without my help, even without the benefit of additional charms hung over the Reformist soldiers or curses disabling the riflemen, we had breached past the midway point on the field.

  We had pushed the Royalists back and now the rest of the Reformist army would clamp them in a pincer, between two advancing lines, and we would have our surrender.

  “It won’t be long, will it?” I asked.

  Polly’s mouth was a hard line. “From what I understand, no. Becoming trapped between the two halves of your army was our worst-case outcome, but even then… even then we anticipated being able to retreat around the city to the harbor. That is now impossible.

  “I could have you killed,” she said quite suddenly. My chest constricted around her words. “Perhaps I ought to.”

  “I’m not a bargaining chip?”

  “Yes, you are.” She turned away, finally, from the burning harbor. There were glints of tears in her eyes, but she blinked them quickly away. “And whatever else, I would rather Galitha—even a perverse Galitha—have you and your abilities than leave us defenseless in the face of the Serafans, should they ever deploy their casting against us.”

  I softened slightly. Polly, Lady Apollonia, loved her country. She loved it badly, twisted her love for it to suit her and her desires, but she loved it.

  “We are both for Galitha, whatever else might be between us,” I said. “And I—I can’t promise anything, but I will advocate for the right treatment of all prisoners.”

  “I know you will.” Polly sighed. “You proved that well enough when, sweet fool that you are, you let me go after I tried to assassinate you.”

  “You’re a very bad assassin.”

  Polly hiccupped a bitter laugh. “I am. Would that I had succeeded, perhaps this day would have been different.”

  “I do not think so,” I said. “What role I played was far less than what the common people of Galitha effected.”

  “So you say.” Polly pulled her shoulders back and smoothed her dark blue skirts. “I imagine we have a parlay to attend, and soon.”

  I didn’t expect to be included in the parlay that led to the formal surrender of the Royalist troops, but the king decided I was worth at least something as a bit of theater to bluff with, so sent a runner to have me brought to them under guard, with bound hands and, ludicrously, blindfolded. Pageantry, I guessed, for the benefit of anyone who thought I might dare to cast a curse over the proceedings.

  Though I couldn’t see where I was shepherded, the shade and the breeze told me we were under a pavilion erected near the battlefield. A marquee top, perhaps. What a ridiculous affectation, I chided whoever had wasted time in putting up a sunshade for the proceedings. As though someone had expected a painting t
o be done of the great surrender at Galitha City, and the artist was even then sketching from life.

  I sobered—it was likely a scene that would be painted and displayed, many times over. And here I was, trussed like a pig at market and with a blindfold.

  I heard the arrival of the Reformist contingent. My heart was in my throat, pressing against my breath, waiting to hear a voice, any voice I recognized. Terrified that one might be absent.

  “You could take the blindfold off her, you know.” Kristos. Cocky, self-assured, slightly inappropriate even now. I exhaled in shaking relief. “She doesn’t have to see you to curse you.”

  “It stays.” The resonant voice of the king himself. “Well. It seems you have bested our efforts here.”

  “We have bested your efforts completely.” Theodor. My knees felt suddenly weak, buried fears that he wouldn’t survive the battle resurfacing now that safety gave them voice. Tears dampened the interior of the blindfold. “We demand unequivocal surrender.”

  “You demand?” That was Pommerly.

  “That is, is it not, the correct term?” Sianh’s careful, clipped diction. I smiled—all three of them, safe.

  “No, it’s the correct term,” Kristos said. “He’s hoping he can bluff us out of pressing the fact that they’re completely surrounded and have no means of retreat.”

  “Enough.” Regardless of his current tenuous position, the former king of Galitha commanded attention. “We mean to offer surrender. But there are terms.”

  “You’re in no position to demand terms,” Kristos said.

  “But we will make our requests. We do hold a prisoner of some value.” I stiffened, but I tried my best not to look concerned. Whatever they say, I begged silently, don’t give in. We’ve come this far.

  “You’ll give us all safe passage and protection,” a new voice said. Merhaven. “You will not take us prisoner, no executions. And in return for that goodwill, we will return her.”

  “No prisoners,” mused Kristos. “No executions. That sounds very well indeed.”