The King's Blood

Dawson

Dawson didn’t like it, but the war now was in the south. His men couldn’t cross the river, and barring a fresh rebellion in Anninfort, Asterilhold had nowhere to land on the eastern side. The blockade in the northern sea blocked trade and kept Antean ships from being harassed, but as long as the border with Northcoast remained open, food and supplies could pour into Asterilhold from the back.

The late spring was thick with mosquitoes, but cold. The high grasses rose to a walking man’s elbow, hiding bogs and cutting the horses’ flanks until they bled. The roads weren’t paved, only thin paths of stable land laced between creeks. The chill water had been fresh when it left the high glaciers topping the mountains to the south and was now undrinkable. Trees blocked their path where pools didn’t. The men’s clothes were starting to fall apart from mildew, and he had lost more soldiers to fever than to the enemy’s swords. His only comfort was that the forces of Asterilhold were suffering the same. There were no garrisons to take shelter in, no holdfasts. The nearest thing to real battle that anyone had seen was the poor idiot Alan Klin whom Geder Palliako had insisted be at the vanguard, and he’d only had a single real skirmish in a high meadow and been driven back from that.

And then the orders had come, written in Palliako’s own hand and under his seal. Withdraw his army to Seref Bridge to meet a group of priests who would somehow overcome the round keep and open the fast way to Kaltfel. Dawson had sent back for clarification. Not that he’d misunderstood, but if he accepted the order and drew his men to the north, it would only mean hauling them back down and beginning the whole painful campaign again when Palliako’s cultists failed. Clarification came, and Dawson had been left nothing except to obey.

Marching north on the cusp of summer, he had at least imagined that he would find a company of warrior priests, drunk on theology and righteousness and ready to throw themselves across the narrow bridge. Even that was a disappointment.

The three men wore robes the grey-brown of sparrows. Their wiry, coarse hair was pulled back from their faces, and they wore expressions of serene benignity that Dawson associated with men drunk past reason or else simple from birth. They stood at the end of the little parade ground outside the keep and bowed to Dawson as he passed.

Dawson leaned in toward Rabbr Bannien, eldest son of Lord Bannien of Estinford and now garrison commander, meeting the boy’s expression with something between despair and rage.

“Tell me this is a joke,” Dawson said.

“I thought the same when they arrived, Lord Marshal,” the young Bannien said. “But now I’ve been watching them for a time… I’m not sure anymore.”

Dawson turned back to consider the garrison force. He hadn’t left a full company at the bridge. There was no point, when a few dozen could defend the keep and a few hundred couldn’t win across to the other side. They looked sharp, smart, and well rested. Unlike his own men. An uneasy thought stirred in his mind.

“Are they cunning men?”

“I don’t think so, my lord. Not like any I’ve ever seen. They don’t… they don’t do anything exactly. It’s just… You’d have to see it, sir.”

“Right, then,” Dawson said. He strode to the tallest of the three priests, nodding at him rather than saluting. “Show me why I should trust my men to your plan.”

Half an hour later, the priest walked out onto the wide span of the bridge alone with only a caller’s horn. The span of the bridge and the rushing water below and the blood-and-stone of the round keep made the priest look like a painter’s image of faith: a sparrow overwhelmed but unbending. Dawson stood at the white keep’s open gate, watching with his arms crossed and tired to the bone from the march and the long, muddy slog of a war before that. Contempt swam at the back of his throat, tasting of bile.

The priest lifted the horn to his mouth and began to shout over the rush of the water below him.

“You have already lost! No force can stand against the army of Antea! You have no power here! You have already lost! Everything you fight for is gone already. Everything you hope for is lost. You cannot win.”

Dawson glanced over at the boy. Young Bannien looked out across the bridge, rapt. His eyes were on the priest, and the ghost of a smile played about the boy’s lips. Dawson felt laughter boiling up in his own throat; it felt like horror.

“This?” Dawson said. “This is how we take the far shore? We nag them out of it?”

“I know,” the garrison commander said. “I had the same reaction at first. But they do this every day and into the night. And the more they do this the more it seems like… it might be true.”

Dawson said something obscene.

“Get that idiot off the bridge before someone puts an arrow in him and bring him to me,” Dawson said. “We’re ending this before we waste any more time.”

“Yes, Lord Marshal,” the boy said, looking abashed. Dawson stalked off through the courtyard and up a flight of stone stairs. The commander’s private rooms were close, dark, and poorly lit. The choice was between light and air, but Dawson would by God see the face of the men he was speaking to. Meantime, he sat in the dim and he seethed.

Palliako’s cultists came together, all three. They bowed at the door and sat on the cushions at Dawson’s feet. They looked up at him with a profound calm, their dark eyes glittering in the candlelight. The garrison commander took his place behind Dawson, standing.

“Tell me the rest of the plan,” Dawson said. “Once you’ve finished your little theater piece, then what?”

The priests looked at one another. They seemed uncomfortable, so that at least was good. They had enough brains between them to notice when they were being dressed down. Dawson sat forward in the camp chair, wood and leather creaking under him.

“When they have understood, you will take what is yours from them,” the middle one said. He had a rounder face than the others, with thin nostrils and lips. He had an accent that reminded Dawson of reading ancient poems as a boy. The cadences of the words seemed like they’d been dug out of a ruin. Or a barrow. “There need be nothing more.”

Dawson ran the tip of his tongue across the inside of his teeth and nodded. It was a gesture he’d picked up as a boy by watching his father when the man was enraged to the edge of violence.

“The hell we will,” he said. “I don’t care if you talk until your tongues cramp. We don’t have the men or the position to take that bridge, and I won’t see a single Antean life lost by this folly.”

“The goddess is with you. You will not fail,” the round-faced priest said.

“Enough! Garrison commander Bannien, I will take full responsibility for ending this, and I will send my written judgment and corrected plans to Camnipol tonight. Please make a courier and horse ready as—”

“Listen to my voice,” the priest said. “You will not fail. We are servants of the truth and the goddess. What we tell you is true. Their men cannot stand against you. They will fail.”

Dawson leaned back. The heat of the room and the smoke of the candle were doing something unpleasant.

“How can you think that is possible?” he said. “Do they have fewer men than they did?”

“It does not matter how many they are.”

“Are they all sick? Is there plague?”

“It does not matter whether they are sick or well. You are the men of Antea, strong at heart and blessed of the goddess. They are weak, and their fear is justified.”

“Be that as it may,” Dawson said, “they are in a fortified position with our only line of attack clear, open, and insecure. All I need to do is look at a map and the numbers, and I can tell you as surely as I can tell you my own name that that keep can’t be taken any more than this one can.”

“Listen to my—”

“I don’t care to listen to your voice, boy,” Dawson said. “I don’t care how often you tell me that a pig is really a kitten. That doesn’t make it true.”

“Yes, my lord,” the middle priest said. “It does.”

Dawson couldn’t do anything but laugh. The candle flames danced and flickered.

“What is a word except what you mean by it, Lord?” the priest said. “This is a dog and that may be a dog, and yet they look nothing like each other. One is half the size of a horse, the other would fit in a woman’s lap. And yet we call them dogs.”

“You can breed them.”

“Timzinae and Haaverkin can’t breed. Which one is the human? A finch and a hawk are birds, can they share an egg? Words are empty until you fill them, and how you fill them shapes the world. Words are the armor and the swords of souls, and the soldiers on the other side of that bridge have no defense against them.”

“Nothing you just said,” Dawson said, stressing each word individually, “makes any damn sense. A war isn’t a word game.”

The priest lifted a finger. “When you became Lord Marshal, nothing about you changed. Your fingers were the same. Your nose. Your backbone. All of your body was as it had been, and yet you were transformed. The words were said, and by being said, they became true. A pig can be another kind of kitten if I say it and you understand its truth. If we say the Timzinae are not human, then they are not. We are the righteous servants of the goddess, and all the world is this way for us. Lies have no power over us, and the words we speak are true.”

“The words you speak won’t turn a blade,” Dawson said.

“Blades turn because hands turn. Hands turn because of hearts. Listen to my voice, Lord, and know what the men who have listened to us already know. What you want is already yours. The blades of Antea are of steel, and your enemies are grass before you.”

“Yes, well, you haven’t seen the grass I’ve just come from,” Dawson said, but his mind was already elsewhere.

The room was close and hot, and the air was thick. It felt like the war. Trapping, confining. They would be years in those marshes, fighting their way to the north mile by mile. Already they’d missed too much of the planting. Food would be scarce in the autumn, and next spring men would starve. And that was as it stood now. Today.

If only what the priests said were true, hundreds—maybe thousands—would live who now were slated to die. Many of them were the men he commanded now. The dead waited in ranks outside the keep, only waiting for their turn to die. Perhaps it didn’t matter if they died here on this bridge or a year and a half from now, starving in the mud of Asterilhold.

“Listen to my voice,” the priest said again. He seemed overly fond of the phrase. “The war is yours if you will accept it from us.”

Dawson took a deep breath. He knew it was doomed. All sense and experience told him that it would fail. And yet, against that knowledge, there was some new force, some waking part of him that he could neither embrace nor deny. It felt like trying to wake from a dream, and being uncertain which was the dream and which the waking world. His skull filled with uncombed wool.

“This is madness,” he said.

“Then you can take joy in madness,” the priest said. “And then in victory.”

They armed.

The priests had wanted to talk to all the men, to assure them all that what was about to happen wouldn’t be Lord Marshal Kalliam marching three hundred men into a slaughter chute. Dawson didn’t allow it. Bad enough that Palliako was taking orders from foreigners and priests. That he was taking them from Palliako.

As soon as he’d left the close little room, the regrets and misgivings had begun to crawl back. But by then the order was given, and there was still that small, almost-silent voice in his mind that said maybe it could all end well.

All night, the priests had stood on the bridge, shouting themselves hoarse in the darkness. The river seemed to shout with them. The rhetoric was much as Dawson had heard before, but there were occasional flourishes. The spirits of the dead marched beside the soldiers of Antea and protected them from harm. The arrow shot at Antean soldiers would turn aside. The river itself was allied with the Severed Throne. It was all about as subtle as schoolyard taunts, but taken over the long, black hours, it built a story in which being loyal to Asterilhold was an unfortunate thing.

Dawson tried to sleep, but only managed a few hours. And then his squire came and told him it was time.

The charge would come at dawn when the sun would be in the enemy’s eyes. They had a better battering ram now— a wider log, and a bronze wedge fixed on the end. A thin roof of slats and thatching would slow the arrows down. Any number of other things could be rained down on it. Hot oil or boiling water. Open flame. It might take half an hour to shatter the opposing gates. How many men could he lose in half an hour? All of them, near enough.

Mist rose from the ground as the first pale light of dawn appeared, blue and rose stretching fingers across the sky. The shouting priests were harsh as crows.

“Men,” Dawson said, addressing his knights. “We are the lords of Antea and the Severed Throne. Nothing more need be said.”

Their swords rang as they cleared their scabbards, his knights making their salute. Dawson turned his mount, and they took their places.

As the first sunlight struck the round keep, Dawson sounded the charge. His farmers and peasants and landless soldiery surged forward across the bridge, their voices blending into a single roar that shouted down the water. For a moment, Dawson let himself believe that the enemy had been stunned into inactivity, paralyzed by the sight of them. Then arrows began to rain down. He watched a man struck in the shoulder stumble and fall into the river and be swept away. More arrows. More screams.

And then the thud of the battering ram began. His mount danced beneath him, frightened by the chaos or feeling his own anxiety or both. The three priests stood by the open mouth of the white keep, huddled in their brown robes looking sleepy and worn.

If we fail, I will send Palliako their heads, he thought.

The press of bodies on the far side of the bridge seemed to breathe, a great, half-formed giant. The ram was its elephantine heart. They weren’t scattered. The arrows weren’t breaking the formation, and while there had been a few torches dropped from the merlons above, the ram hadn’t taken fire. They were doing well. Even if they died, they died bravely.

Something changed. The thud and thud and thud became a crack. And then a splintering. And then a shout went up and the men before him were pushing into the round keep through broken doors.

“Take them!” Dawson shouted. “Knights of Antea, to me! To me!”

Leaning close to his horse’s back, he flew across the bridge, his lips pulled back in a grimace of rage and joy and the lust of battle. The clot of bodies he struck on the other side was as much his own side as the others, but they scattered all the same. And then all of them were there, inside the keep’s round courtyard, breaking over the enemy like a wave and washing them away. Something was burning, the smoke acrid and dense and invigorating. The screams of the soldiers was music.

By midday, even the last of it was over. Sixty soldiers of Asterilhold dead. Twice that captured. He could only guess the number scattered to the winds and the waters. Most of all, the dragon’s jade road was his, cleared and opened into the heart of the enemy’s kingdom.

He stood on the ramparts of this, his new keep, the first soil west of the Siyat that an Antean had unquestionably held for a generation. The courier that he’d meant to take his refusal to Palliako stood by, waiting. Dawson handed the boy seven letters, folded and sewn and marked with his seal. The orders to all his commanders in the field, telling each of them the same thing. The war is won. Leave the swamps and come to me.

It should have been glorious. It should have been the finest moment in a life rich with them.

Below him, in the courtyard of the keep, the men were laughing and dancing. Two of the farmers were kicking the head of an Asterilhold soldier between them like a ball until the garrison commander saw them and put a stop to it. Wine flowed, and things stronger than wine. The banners of Asteril hold were put to the flame, and the banners of Antea-lifted.

The banners of Antea, and also one other. Red, with an eightfold sigil. And in the courtyard, the three sparrows laughed and shook hands and received the gratitude of the men. Palliako’s pet cultists. This wasn’t his victory. It wasn’t the Severed Throne’s or even Palliako’s. It was the foreign priests’, and even if none of the others knew it, he did. He knew it, and more than that, he knew what it meant.

He had let himself be perverted.