The Last Mortal Bond

38

Adare sat at her writing desk, though she made no effort to write. She had returned to her chambers at the top of the Crane late the night before after an evening arguing with Nira and Kegellen, had fallen onto her bed still clothed, dropped into a blank sleep, then woken to the midnight gong. For a while, she’d tried to go back to sleep, but sleep proved every bit as elusive as Triste. The girl’s face filled Adare’s mind, those violet eyes drugged but defiant, her words quiet but horribly final: All of you scheming bastards are going to cut each other down.

If the girl were no more than a leach, her escape would still have been a disaster. According to Kaden, however, she was the vessel of a goddess, the human incarnation of Ciena herself. It seemed impossible, and yet it fit too perfectly with il Tornja’s claims about Long Fist and Meshkent, with the fact that the kenarang had been willing to give up Adare herself in order to see the creature dead. Certainly, Kaden seemed to believe the tale he had told her days before. Which meant, if it were true, that Adare’s mistake in letting the girl escape may have doomed them all.

Finally, she cursed, got up, and crossed to the doors leading out to her balcony. She unlatched them, then threw them open. The summer air washed over her skin, lifted her hair, then let it fall. She’d intended to write, to toil away at the backlog of imperial business waiting at her desk, but instead she’d just been sitting there, sitting there for half the night, the lamps unlit, the inkwell unopened, staring out those open doors from the darkness of her chambers into the larger darkness of the world beyond.

According to Kaden, the kenta were doors of a sort, gates, impossible passages from one land to the next. He could step from Annur to Sia as easily as Adare herself might walk from room to room. At first, she hadn’t believed him. Surely, her father would have told her, would have trained her in the way he had trained her about so much else. That he had neglected this most crucial fact of his rule, the secret of the entire Malkeenian line, seemed both cruel and pointless. Then Kaden showed her.

It didn’t look like anything, really, a strange arch in the basement of an abandoned Shin chapterhouse in one of Annur’s backwater neighborhoods. Certainly it didn’t look like the relic of a vanished race, the worst weapon of their genocidal war. It might have been nothing more than the folly of an eccentric architect until Kaden, his eyes cold as the winter stars, stepped through and vanished.

“I won’t come back,” he’d said. “Not right away.”

And he did not.

That should have been a relief. He was searching for Triste, after all, using the network of gates to hunt down and reclaim the leach. If he succeeded, if he brought her back, there might still be some hope of thwarting il Tornja, of rescuing the gods and the millions of men and women who depended on them. The stakes were almost ludicrous, far too large for any human mind to comprehend, but Adare didn’t find herself thinking of all those millions, not really. When she thought of what hung in the balance, it wasn’t humanity she pictured, not Annur, not her brother, or Nira, or Lehav: there was only one face, her son’s, those tiny blazing eyes, the pudgy hands; though to her horror, the memories she had of him were fraying.

Just another thing I can’t keep hold of, she thought, as she stared out the doors into the night.

In the dark hours, she tallied up her failures: her father, her mother, her son, one brother murdered, another, at least for now, beyond a set of gates that she could never pass. She’d lost control of the general she’d hoped would hold the northern front, and for all she knew, she was losing the front as well. She’d managed to reclaim her family’s throne, but to what end? Every day, the good she’d hoped to work, the security and safety she’d hoped to bring to all Annur, crumbled like clay in her hands. Partly it was the council’s fault, but another emperor, someone stronger, wiser, would have found a way to take the recalcitrant bastards in hand, to trick them or twist them into acting for the public good. Another emperor would have done what she had not.

And then there was her miracle, her blessing, the touch of the goddess laid into her very flesh. Adare ran a finger along the smooth whorls of scar. In the days following the lightning at the Everburning Well, she had believed, really believed for the first time in her life, that Intarra was something other than a name, a myth, a convenient fiction to cement her family’s rule. The people had called her Prophet, and with the exhortation of the goddess ringing in her ears, she had accepted the title, worn it like an armor in her righteous fight. That righteousness, though, had seeped away-partly when Fulton died, then Valyn, partly when she forgave her father’s murderer-and the title felt too large for her now, shining, ostentatious, hollow.

While Adare claimed to speak for Intarra-a goddess she could neither hear nor understand-there were others who walked the world, Triste and Long Fist, whose gods lived in their very flesh. Adare made speeches, accepted the genuflection of the Sons of Flame, of all Annur, but the words were her own. They were mortal, fallible. Whether she spoke the language of the Lady of Light, she had no idea. Not much more than a year earlier, she had seen a man destroyed for such a profanation of his faith. It had felt good to watch Uinian pinned there, burning in the awful beam of light. It had felt right. It was only justice, she had told herself, to unmask a traitor and a false priest, a man who invoked the name of the goddess for nothing greater than his own gain.

And if the false priest deserved to burn, she asked herself grimly, what of a false prophet?

Before she could fashion an answer to the question, a sharp rap sounded at the door. She glanced at the hourglass at the desk’s corner-more than an hour remained before dawn. It would be urgent, for someone to disturb her now. Slowly, methodically, she put away her doubts, her fears, set them inside the drawers of her mind, then closed those drawers. Perhaps she was a fraud. Perhaps she would be unmasked one day, burned alive as she had seen Uinian burn. Fine. It didn’t change the fact that there was work to do, and no one else to do it.

* * *

Instead of a legislative session, Adare might have been looking at the moments immediately before a battle. By the time she arrived in the hall, most of the others were already there, despite the fact that the sun had yet to rise. Her own stomach twisted sickeningly inside her, as though the news were rancid meat that her body refused to digest, but she managed to keep her face still. On that front alone, she was a step ahead of almost everyone else on the council.

They had gathered inside the Hall of the Chosen-the vast chamber they had selected as the legislative seat after Adare burned their map and the catwalks above it-but instead of seating themselves around the massive wooden table, almost everyone was standing, gathered in small knots by atrepy or alliance, all talking at the same time, a few of the delegates doing quite a bit more than that, bellowing in the faces of their ostensible friends and loudly cursing their enemies. No weapon longer than a belt knife was allowed inside the council chamber. Otherwise, Adare felt sure, blood would have spilled already.

There should have been a herald at the door to announce her, but either because of the chaos or the early hour or both, he was missing. As a result, despite the Sons of Flame at her side, almost no one noticed her arrival. She might have been a slave carrying a plate of roasted firefruit, a fact that had its advantages: it meant she had longer than she’d expected to gauge the situation, not that there was much to gauge. The men and women tasked with leading Annur through her darkest days were baffled, terrified. If they had a plan to deal with the coming catastrophe, Adare saw no sign of it.

As Adare studied the crowd, Nira approached from behind her. Whether a messenger had woken the old woman, too, Adare had no idea, not that it really mattered. She was here, now, glaring at the assembled council as though they were a herd of swine that had broken into her home.

“This is a disaster,” Adare muttered quietly.

“Been a disaster all along,” the small woman snapped. “Like a cracked glass no one notices until the day it shatters.”

“Il Tornja didn’t say anything about leaving the front?”

“No,” Nira replied. “He did not. You think I would a’ skipped that part when I first arrived?”

Adare shackled her impatience. “Were there any hints-”

“If there’d a’ been hints, you’d a’ known ’em. Now, you want ta keep up with the dumb questions, or you want ta do something about this?” Nira waved her cane toward the madness, almost taking out the eye of the senior delegate from Aragat. The man was saved by the endless slope of his nose, but he blundered backward all the same, rounded on Nira in a rage, recognized her belatedly, then turned to Adare, lips pulled back as though he were ready to bite.

When he finally found his words, they came out loud and all at once.

“Your ’Kent-kissing general has betrayed us!”

Nira did hit him then, swinging her cane up in a clean arc that took the man square across the throat. It was impossible to tell if he’d been about to say something more because he dropped to one knee, hacking up an awful cough, clutching at his neck.

“When you speak to the Emperor,” Nira said, standing over the Aragatan, “you will use her proper title.”

“Nira…,” Adare began, then let it drop. There was no restraining the old woman, and besides, the people standing nearest had already turned. They stared at her for one heartbeat, two, three, then the questions began-demands, really-crashing over her like waves. It was impossible, in the shouted chaos, to make out more than a few words at a time-why did you let … if he’s a traitor … not warned … a betrayal of the greatest proportion-but the gist was clear enough.

Time to be Emperor, Adare thought bleakly.

Ignoring the cries, she stepped up onto the massive wooden table. There was something to be said for being above everyone else, and when you didn’t have a throne handy, well, you just had to improvise. Usually, she wore thin silk slippers inside the palace, but after learning the dire news, some part of her had wanted to dress, not for debate, but for war. In addition to a severe tunic and split pants, she’d thrown on riding boots, and now, as she strode to the center of the table, the heels punched out a grim rhythm against the wood.

It was tempting to try to raise her voice above the chaos, but Adare was no battlefield commander. There was nothing to be gained by entering a screaming match she was sure to lose, and so she waited, turning in a slow circle until she was sure she’d caught every eye. Then she started talking in her normal voice, exaggerating the movement of her lips slightly, but making no effort to compete with the general din.

“Early this morning,” she began, “I received grim tidings of events taking place to the north.” The opening words weren’t important. No one could hear her anyway. The important thing was to be seen talking. “I came here in all haste,” she went on, “because this is obviously a matter of the greatest import.”

One by one, then in small groups, the assembled legislators fell silent. A few of the councillors were still rattling on-Adare could make out Bouraa Bouree baying his displeasure somewhere toward the back of the room-but for most of the delegates, the desire to hear what she was saying had, at least for the moment, overcome the desire to be heard. Adare paused, shook her head, fixed in place her imperial visage, felt her eyes blaze.

All an act, of course. Her legs felt weak beneath her. Aside from half a cup of ta gulped down as she dressed, she had put nothing in her stomach, and her guts twisted viciously. Don’t puke, she growled silently to herself. And don’t shake. They were all silent now, even Bouree, and when she finally raised her voice, it came out clear, carved from the stone of some confidence that was not her own.

“This is a disgrace,” she said, gesturing to the chamber with a hand.

“It’s not your place-” someone began.

“Not my place to what?” Adare demanded. “To come into the council chamber? To berate you all for behavior that would shame a group of children?”

Ziav Moss stepped forward, his face grave. “According to the treaty that you signed, Your Radiance, the Emperor, bright be the days of her life, has no place in the affairs of the council. This body decides policy. It is your part only to put it into action.”

“And what policy is it that you have decided?” Adare demanded. She held Moss’s cold gaze for a moment, then slowly shifted her eyes over the other women and men. “Please tell me, because evidently our general has disappeared, the Urghul are south of the Thousand Lakes, and I am eager, as the one responsible for taking action, to take action.”

“These tidings are fresh even to us,” Moss replied. “We must sort fact from hearsay. We must take the necessary time to consider all available options. The work required here is nuanced, Your Radiance, sophisticated in ways few would understand. Rushing headlong into a battle we don’t fully understand will look like bravery in these early days, but I fear it will seem like folly later.”

A few heads had started nodding along with Moss. They play nice with each other only when the monster has arrived, Adare thought. And I get to be the monster.

“Far be it from me,” she said, raising her hands in mock surrender, “to stand in the way of deliberation. When I arrived, however, the scene looked more like a screaming melee.”

“We are, all of us, understandably upset-” Moss said.

Adare cut him off before he could finish. “You cannot afford to be upset. Annur cannot afford it.” She shook her head. “Let me tell you something. You are the legislators of an empire, the lawmakers who will decide the fate of millions. Fishwives can scream when they are upset, loggers can brawl in their northern camps, merchants can rail at one another over brimming cups of wine, but you are not fishwives, nor loggers, nor merchants.”

She shook her head, letting that point sink in. It was a delicate dance, chastising them while also appealing to their pride. “The reason you sit around this table, you instead of any of the other millions of souls whose asses would fit those seats as well, is precisely this: you are better.

“This, at least, is what I had hoped. I had hoped you would be better than drunken sailors in a crisis, that you would keep your heads where others would run mad. I had hoped to come here, to this room, to find the leaders of Annur already assembled, already seated, already well on the way to the formulation of a plan. I had hoped you would be impatient with me, chafing at my absence, ready and eager to share the outlines of a response to this disaster.” She raised her brows. “Did I hope for too much?”

For a moment, there was only silence in the room. Then Bouraa Bouree bulled his way forward, lips twisted in a snarl as he leveled his finger at Adare.

“I will not … will not … stand here,” he barked, his words tangling in his anger. “I will not stand and listen to a … to this … chastisement from a woman who has sat upon the throne barely a month.” It was clear that he wanted to say more, and worse, but whatever the full fury of his thoughts, Adare was still the Emperor, and the man had retained at least a modicum of caution. “I suggest you tend to your work, Your Radiance, and we will tend to ours.”

“By all means,” Adare said, gesturing to the empty chairs, inviting them all to sit. “Start tending. We might start with the messengers. Where are they?”

“Here, Your Radiance,” said a new voice, weary but firm, off to the side of the room.

As the members of the council grudgingly sat, the two men who had carried the word stepped forward. They were both obviously legionaries, and older than Adare had expected, well into their early forties, creased and hard as riding leather, lean from lives lived in the saddle, quartering whole continents on horseback bearing messages of death: battles lost or won, armies marching, towns lost. Someone had chosen these older men, the most experienced, to deliver the most dire tidings.

“Your names?” Adare asked.

They stiffened, raising knuckles to brows in the type of military salute rarely encountered inside the Dawn Palace. “I am Jia Chem, Your Radiance,” replied the shorter of the two, “and this is Ulli, who men call the Coyote.”

Both men kept their eyes fixed straight ahead.

“Who is your commanding officer?”

“Jan Belton, with the Seventeenth.”

“Where is the Seventeenth stationed?”

“We’ve been northeast of Aergad since the winter, Your Radiance.”

Aergad. Where she had left her son, thinking him sheltered behind the crumbling walls. If the Urghul broke through, it would be the first place they razed. Brutally, she shoved the thought aside.

“What was the state of that city when you left?”

For the first time, Chem hesitated, glancing over at Ulli.

“Speak,” Adare said impatiently. “We are not in the habit, here in Annur, of hurting those who tell a painful truth.”

“Of course, Your Radiance,” the rider replied, bowing his head. “Of course. Aergad survives, but the bridge over the Haag is destroyed.”

Aergad survives. Relief flooded Adare, then disgust at herself that she had felt such relief. There were other lives than her son’s at stake.

“And your legion?” she pressed. “And the rest of the Army of the North?”

The man grimaced. “Alive, but west of the river. On the wrong side.”

At that, the whole chamber erupted into shouts and cries. Adare started to raise her own voice, then shook her head and just waited for the furor to subside. It moved on finally, violent as a summer squall, then faded to hissed whispers and shaking heads, as though everyone in the room had collectively rejected the messenger’s words.

Silence finally settled back over the room, glassy and fragile.

Adare spoke into that silence, trying not to shatter it. “Deliver your full report.”

Jia Chem bowed again, then began.

“All winter, we were able to hold the Urghul with help from the snow-”

“We don’t need a three-volume history,” Adare cut in. “Start with what matters, with what’s happening now.”

Chem nodded, reframing his message, then began again. “The kenarang is gone. No one’s sure where. He left orders with his generals to hold the Urghul in the foothills as long as possible, then to fall back on Aergad. Our men fought, but without the kenarang, it was hopeless. We were forced back almost immediately. No one knows how to stand against the Priest.”

“The Priest?” Randi Helti demanded, teeth clamped on the stem of her unlit pipe.

“Meaning the leach,” Chem replied, his weathered face grim. “The Kettral traitor. His name’s Balendin, but the men just call him the Priest. Short for the Priest of Pain. Supposedly it was Long Fist, an Urghul chief, who united the blood-loving savages, but no one’s seen him in half a year. The Priest, though…” He shook his head. “He’s everywhere. For a while, he was with the nomads east of Scar Lake, then he disappeared briefly, then turned up in the west, where he’s been trying to force a way through in the foothills of the Romsdals. There’s a little strip of land up there between the mountains and the forest, an east-west passage high and dry enough to ride horses over, and that’s where the worst of the fighting’s been since late winter. We’ve got legions upon legions plugging that tiny gap, and men are still dying by the hundreds and the thousands.

“No one can stop the Priest-no one can even get near him-and somehow it seems that each week, he’s stronger. The Urghul are little better than beasts, but when he’s leading them, they’re mad, almost rabid, insane in their eagerness to get at us. I’ve watched their warriors, their weapons gone, climb over piles of bodies, then hurl themselves on our soldiers, biting, snarling, clawing, fighting like animals until we put them down.

“And sometimes it seems that the horsemen are the least of it. The Priest…” He paused, eyes bleak with some remembered horror. “He can make the rivers burn. He can flick a finger and send rocks the size of cattle crashing through our lines. He can turn the sky to ice, shatter it, so that chunks the size of stones come crashing down into our army. I saw a sergeant’s skull crushed inside his steel helmet. His face was … pulp.”

The soldier seemed to have forgotten his audience. His gaze was fixed on empty air, his hand opening and closing convulsively at his side, as though reaching for something he could never quite find.

“You can usually see the Priest. He finds a knoll with a vantage of the field-just laughs at our archers-and he has a dozen captives dragged up after him. Sometimes they’re just loggers, but more and more he has Annurian troops, our men still in their own armor, and he … does things to them.”

“Things?” Adare asked. She could have spared herself the account. During her months in the north, she’d heard in horrific detail of Balendin’s depredations. The other members of the council, however, were staring at the soldier, shocked. After almost a year prowling the borders of the empire, the war was suddenly close. Jia Chem’s tales-tales that might have met with disbelief or indifference a month earlier-were suddenly, awfully relevant. They need to hear this, Adare thought. And maybe I do, too. Since Nira’s unexpected arrival in the city, she’d been too wrapped up in her own private terrors and hopes. While plotting to free Triste, to find a way to save her son, she’d all but ignored the larger war. And now, suddenly, she was losing it.

“I watched him once,” Jia Chem went on, driven somehow to tell it all. “I watched him take a man, a soldier about my size, and just … turn him inside out. That poor fucking bastard-he was still alive. I could see his lungs heaving, pink-white, strong at first, then weaker, and weaker. The Priest held the beating heart awhile, held it the way you or I might hold an apple, then he handed it to the soldier, made him hold his own heart.… It took forever for him to die, and all the time our men were fighting, trying not to look up, but knowing what was happening up there on that hill. Another time the Priest held a man’s head in his hands while his pet falcon pecked out the tongue, the cheeks, the eyes.…”

“Stop calling him the Priest,” Adare said finally, snapping the trembling cord of the man’s story. “His name is Balendin. He’s sick, twisted, filthy, but like any other leach, he’s just a man. He has weaknesses.” She pointed at the riders. “You held him back, you and the rest of the legions. Whatever vicious little rituals he enacts, you stopped him.”

“No, Your Radiance,” Jia Chem replied. He bowed his head again, but the words were hard. “The kenarang stopped him. For months now, we’ve been pressed desperately, but wherever the Priest appeared, there was our general. He’s not a leach, but he sees a battle, he sees…” He trailed off helplessly. “I can’t explain the genius.”

You don’t need to, Adare thought. Not to me. It wasn’t until that day atop the stone tower in Andt-Kyl, watching il Tornja command his army, that she finally realized the kind of creature she had spared. He was shaped like a man, had a man’s face and hands, but when she looked into those perfectly empty eyes, instead of any human feeling, she had found only a great, implacable immensity, frigid as the coldest winter night, alien as the space between stars.

“Are we to understand,” Moss demanded, “that your general has abandoned his post?”

“Abandoned?” Chem pronounced the word as though the action it described couldn’t possibly apply to il Tornja. “No. The kenarang would never abandon us.” Ulli, too, was shaking his head.

“But he is gone,” Adare said bluntly.

Where? That was the crucial question.

Adare didn’t believe the general was dead, not even for a heartbeat. He hadn’t lived through all those long millennia, through wars, and purges, just to die falling off his horse, or from a stray arrow to the eye. He was alive. The certainty was solid and undeniable as a jagged stone lodged in her mind. If he had disappeared, it was for his own reasons, in order to act out some scheme that Adare herself had always failed to see. He could be anywhere by now, could be allied with Balendin himself for all Adare understood the fucking situation.

She felt like a child staring at the great book of the world, diligently, stupidly studying letters she could not read. Il Tornja had created the Atmani; what did that mean? He seemed intent on waging a vicious war against an Urghul chief that he claimed was the God of Pain; what did that mean? He wanted Triste freed.…

Adare paused, then beckoned to Jia Chem. “When?” she demanded.

She could barely hear her own voice over the room’s din, and the rider hesitated, shook his head, then bowed and stepped closer.

“Beg pardon, Your Radiance?”

“When did he disappear? The kenarang? What day?”

“It’s hard to say, Your Radiance. The kenarang has always moved along the front, riding through the night from one legion to the next, arriving unexpectedly where he is needed most, then disappearing again. We thought his most recent absence was just that … part of a larger stratagem that none of us could ever understand.”

“Estimate.”

He pursed his lips, shook his head. “It must have been…” He closed his eyes, calculating. “Maybe ten days back?”

Adare took a slow, shuddering breath. It’s just a guess, she told herself. He just got done saying he can’t be certain. But the coincidence seemed too strange, too perfect.

The same day, Adare thought. He disappeared the same day we broke Triste free.

“And then?” she asked.

“Then the Urghul broke through in the foothills. We kept fighting, made a strategic retreat, but order started leaking out. Once enough men knew we were going to fall back on Aergad anyway, get behind the bridge and the river and those high stone walls, they lost stomach for the fight-no point dying over ground you’re planning to give up.”

“But if the army’s in Aergad,” Adare said, consulting her memory of the map, “there’s nothing standing between the Urghul and Annur itself.”

Jia Chem nodded bleakly. “Commander Belton understood that. He refused to cross the bridge, insisted on staying on the east side of the Haag.”

“With how many men?”

“A couple hundred.”

Silence settled on the room, heavy and cold.

Finally, Kiel spoke. “Two hundred men,” he said quietly, “against Balendin and the entire might of the Urghul? They wouldn’t last an afternoon. They wouldn’t last the first charge.”

Jia Chem nodded. “Belton expected to die. Our place is fighting for our land and our families, not hiding. That’s what he said to the men. The other commanders believed that the kenarang had a plan, that il Tornja’d find a way, even with the army on the wrong side of the river, to stop the Urghul before they pushed too far south. I was there, at Belton’s shoulder, when they argued with him to retreat. They said that disregarding the kenarang’s order was treason. He just shrugged. The kenarang comes and goes, he said, but my conscience never leaves me.”

“And what happened,” Adare asked, dreading the answer, “to Commander Belton and his men?”

Jia Chem shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. Not for sure. The Kettral sent us south before the battle began.”

“Kettral?” Adare asked sharply.

Mention of the fighting force sent a shiver of excitement and confusion through the room, and it took some time before the tumult subsided.

“They were Kettral,” the messenger said. “Four of them…”

“With a bird?”

Chem shook his head. “If they had a bird, they could have flown here to warn you. Ulli and I can ride, but we’re nothing compared to those creatures. No. They were on horseback, riding with a small group of Urghul, maybe two dozen, a group that had broken off from the main army, traitors to their own people, I guess. I don’t know-the one in charge told us to ride south. We’d planned to stay, to fight along with Belton and the others, but this man,” the messenger shook his head at the memory, “he wasn’t the sort you disobeyed.”

Adare’s skin had risen into gooseflesh. Four Kettral. Valyn had died in Andt-Kyl, but the rest of his Wing might have survived.

“Can you describe them?” she asked.

Jia Chem glanced at Ulli for the second time. The Coyote’s face was tight, frightened.

“I’d never seen Kettral up close,” he said finally. “And I hope I never do again. They were all different-the leader was coal-black and short, there was a woman, she was beautiful, even though her skin was sickly pale and she didn’t have a tongue. One of them was blind, one seemed to be missing half his teeth. They were all different but they were all the same-they didn’t look at you, they looked through you. Like they could already see you dead, and were just trying to decide whether it was time to make it so.” He shuddered. “They rode up out of the woods. No warning. No nothing. Their commander told us to ride south, to bring you word of what was coming.

“‘What are you going to do?’ I managed to ask him.

“He just smiled. ‘We’ll try to hold ’em long enough to give those idiots in the south a head start with the defense.’

“There were only four of them, not counting the Urghul.” He held up his fingers, stared at them as though he couldn’t quite believe what he was saying. “Four. And he talked about holding back the Priest and the whole Urghul army as though it were an irritation. An inconvenience.”

Adare tried to make sense of the story and failed. Aside from Valyn, she didn’t know any of the Kettral by face or name. The soldiers in question sounded older than the remnants of Valyn’s Wing, but beyond that, there was little else to be learned. Grimly, she turned her attention to the larger question.

“How far away are the Urghul now? How fast are they coming?”

“I can’t be sure, Your Radiance,” Chem replied. “The Kettral-”

“Assume the Kettral failed. That they are dead.”

“Still, there are so many factors.…”

“Estimate.”

“Any estimate I make-”

“-will be miles better than anything we could come up with,” she snapped impatiently. “You know this foe. You have watched them, fought them.”

Jia Chem hesitated, glanced over at Ulli, then nodded.

“A whole army-even an Urghul army-is slower than two men. We’ve stopped only to change mounts, haven’t really been out of the saddle since Aergad.” He shook his head wearily. “If they pushed hard, they might be halfway to Annur, but that’s not the Priest’s way. He likes to stop, to hold his sick ceremonies-it’s like he wants to savor all the pain he’s caused.” He frowned. “I’d say they’re still four or five days out.”

Four or five days. The words went through Adare like an icy blade.

The council chamber erupted into madness once more, but this time Adare made no effort to impose order. For months, the Urghul had pressed against the Annurian lines all along the northern front, and for months, the legions had held them off. The battles were savage. The northern swamps ran red with blood in a dozen places, but each time the horsemen had attacked, the legions threw them back. The horror remained, but Adare had started to believe it was contained. She had even allowed herself to hope, after signing the treaty with the council, that the newly unified Annur might finally crush the horsemen once and for all. And now there was an Urghul army five days from Annur.

Even as she sat there, bafflement and rage playing out all around her, men and women were dying, sacrificed on Balendin’s blades and in his fires.

All while I schemed and meddled, spent my energy on freeing that leach so I could see my son again.

She wanted to be sick. Sick for all the tens of thousands she had failed, and for her own child, if he was even still alive. It seemed suddenly, violently important to go over it all again, every choice, every decision she had made. Somewhere along the way, she had made a mistake, maybe dozens of mistakes, but she found that just exactly where she had gone wrong, she couldn’t say. In fact, whatever her errors, whatever her flaws, it was starting to seem that she might be irrelevant. She was the Emperor, accounted Intarra’s prophet by an army of the faithful, but what had she done? Il Tornja had held back the Urghul and their bloody priests. Not the council. Not Adare. Not even the legions, really. It all hinged on il Tornja, and now he was gone.

“Five days,” she said, the words rising like bile to her tongue.

“We do not know precisely what’s taking place up there,” Moss observed. “This account is vague.”

“It is what we have,” Adare spat. “We know what we know. Il Tornja is gone. The Urghul have broken past the Army of the North, and are pushing south out of the lakes. I’ve seen these horsemen with my own eyes, seen what they do. Even now, while we are talking, they are hurting Annurians, burning, raping, rending, and killing the people we have sworn to protect. Right now, there are babies-” She hesitated half a heartbeat, the memory of Sanlitun’s face filling her mind again, then forced herself ahead. “Right now there are children hanging from the trees. There are men staked naked to the earth, their bellies open to the sky.”

She could see the horror seeping into their eyes, as though that simple syllable-war-were a relic of another tongue, something to be puzzled over, debated, but never truly faced, as though they were only now, after almost a year, starting to understand what the word actually meant.

“And I will tell you something else,” she said, forging ahead before they could regain their balance. “Those horsemen are coming here, to Annur, to this city, and right now we have no force in place to stop them.”

“Well,” Kegellen said, speaking into the stunned silence, patting at her chest with her hand as she surveyed the room. “All this excitement has strained my fat old heart.”

She didn’t look strained, Adare thought. She looked ready, almost eager.

After another moment, Bouraa Bouree stumbled to his feet. “We must move the council. Move it immediately. Evacuate those of us crucial to this government…”

The other voices spoke over and around him in a grim chorus of fear and denial.

“… we go to the eastern coast…”

“… Sia is well provisioned. We could defend…”

“… the fortresses of the northwest…”

The panic moved like fire from one voice to the next, blazing higher, brighter. Adare heard it roaring around her, felt it hot and urgent in the air. There was something inside herself, however, that would not catch. It felt as though her heart had been scorched already, burned down to the roots by so many months of fighting and fear. There was a strange safety in that blackened desolation. She imagined herself standing on a wide patch of charred earth while the world burned around her. The cries of the others didn’t frighten her. They made her angry.

“We are staying,” she said.

No one heard. The fury raged.

“We are staying,” she said again, more quietly this time.

Ziav Moss was on his feet calling for calm. He, too, was failing. For a moment, he met Adare’s eyes, then looked away.

They can’t face it, she thought. None of them will face what is coming.

Il Tornja was gone. The council was falling apart, readying itself to flee. Annur was tearing itself apart, and all the while the Urghul were coming, a world of war and fire at their backs.

“I am staying,” Adare said after a long pause, the words loud enough for her ears alone.