It was a sultry night, as Keter’s tended to be.
The heat was poisonous and unease thrummed through the camps like a pulsing vein. The arrival of the dwarves – a story heavily curated before it was released to the soldiers, though Akua had heard the full of it from the source – had given the Grand Alliance hope of victory once more, but all still remembered the last assault on Keter’s walls. Much death had achieved nothing, and none were eager to be the tip of the spear when tomorrow came. It was certain death, all agreed, and even the ever-loyal Army of Callow was balking at the thought of being thrown into the grinder headfirst. None of that, though, was truly Akua’s concern.
Perhaps if she had made different choices she would be leading the Dread Empire into the breach come dawn, or unleashing some horrible sorcery serving as Malicia’s own treacherous Warlock, but it was not to be. Fingers tightened around her cup – a golden goblet set with opals, one of the few gifts she’d received as empress-claimant that she had liked – and she drank deep of the Cantal red. It was about to become a much rarer find, Akua thought. Procer would have better use for good land than vineyards in the coming decades, and that meant many vintages were on the verge of disappearance.
Perhaps for good. The world, these days, seemed set on changing.
“So best enjoy it while I still can, yes?” Akua murmured.
Fingers tightened around the cup again, her lips wet but far from sated. She did not regret making the choice she had in the heart of the Tower, not even now. Her eyes closed, thinking of the sound the match had made as she scratched it against stone, all Akua Sahelian felt was guilty relief. That she had not been trapped on that chair, chained to that fate. Made to go through a lifetime of empty motions, screaming inside. And yet as the days passed, she found that frustration had begun nipping at her heels. She traced the golden rim of the cup with her thumb, absent-minded.
“Vanity,” she told the night, neither quite asking nor stating.
There was no one else in the tent for her to speak to, after all. The Army of Callow, while it tolerated her presence and many rumours had come from her departure and return to Catherine’s side – some expected, like that it had been a scheme from the two of them from the start, others rather more amusing like Akua having found the Black Queen a better lover than the Empress and so turned her cloak again – would never be comfortable with her tent being too deep in its camp. She had never felt threatened, of course. Dartwick had ensured none would lay had on her few possessions, ever dutiful, and Masego had kindly wards around her tent on her behalf until she gained her own magic back.
But she would never be welcome there, in the beating heart of Catherine’s kingdom of soldiers, and though she was not one to shy from hatred she had found she preferred setting her tent near the edges of the camp. In Keter that was not so far out, given the nature of the siege walls, but it had been far enough that she had been able to obtain a view of the Crown of the Dead looming in the distance.
“And if there was ever a reason to drink,” she snorted, toasting the tall walls and the horrors still lying in wait behind them.
She drank, but it settled the restlessness in her belly no more than the other sips had. Vanity, she’d hazarded, but she was not so sure it was true. Akua was one of the great spellcasters of this siege, treated with the same awe as the Witch of the Woods or the Hierophant without having a Name of her own, but months ago she had been the fulcrum of an ancient empire’s fate. She had been… more than she now was. That night in Serolen had not scratched the itch, only drawing attention to it. There had been a moment where it was all in her hands once more, and she had been able to decide.
It had felt good, returning to Masego what had been unjustly denied him. Of all the Named she had known, only Hierophant had never wavered from that bright, impossibly clear moment that defined your Name. He had, from the beginning to the end, stayed true to himself. If such sincerity was not worthy of a good turn, what possibly could?
But the days had passed and Serolen now felt like a world behind. So now Akua Sahelian sat alone in the dark, drinking wine soon to be as much of a relic and looking at the heart of the darkness in the distance. The Dead King’s subtle, creeping malevolence – so incredibly banal, until the pit of despair swallowed you up. She drank and wondered if it was vanity, to think she should be more than simply a spellhand in this war. Perhaps it was. Before she could be moved to decide whether that answer would be found at the bottom of a fourth cup of Cantal red, there was a whisper in the back of her mind.
Her wards had been set off. Curious, and not feeling particularly threatened, she lowers the threshold to allow for the entrance of they who would enter her tent. The flap was parted and a man’s silhouette – ah, was that the slightest shiver of disappointment she felt? – entered, straightening before sniffing the air.
“Wine in the dark on the eve of a battle?” Kendi Akaze scorned, lighting a magelight with the flick of his wrist. “How very maudlin, Sahelian.”
Akua was not sure what was worse. That he had come, or that some part of her was dimly pleased for it. Kendi was tall man, with a sculpted beard and the pale brown eyes of a mfuasa. Hatred of her never left them, which had learned to find a reassuring weight. It had been the one thing whose sincerity she did not need to doubt.
“That was my very aim,” Akua easily replied. “How kind of you to compliment me so.”
He took a seat across from her, not asking permission, and helped himself to her wine.
“You are growing comfortable again,” Kendi said.
“Is that why you’re here?” she asked.
The dark-skinned man eyed her with distaste.
“Why else would I be in your presence?”
Akua had spent several months being taught how best to use her looks, when she had been younger, and the lessons had not left her. It was the easiest thing in the world to shift in her seat so that her dress would call attention to the curve of her breasts, that the line of her legs would be put in display.
“I wonder,” Akua replied, tone languid. “Can you truly think of nothing else?”
His eyes did not dip and he hardly seemed enticed. Hatred truly was a most useful thing.
“You are wrong, as it happens,” Akua continued, shifting back into a more comfortable pose. “Comfort escapes me.”
It was foolish to tell him as much, she knew. She was no longer as she had been in Ater, dazed and despairing. She ought to know better. And yet, looking at the man whose sister she had gotten killed for… what? She could hardly even tell, now. Looking at that brown-eyed man, she still saw the same thing she had when she had first spared him: her past made into a man. A voice speaking for the long line of sisters and daughters she had led to their deaths and never given a second thought to. No, it was only natural that it was not Catherine who had come to visit her tonight.
This one was an older ghost, with a deeper claim.
“Does it?” Kendi said. “You are returned to the Warden’s side. Again in her service and confidence. What doors are to be closed to you, after this war?”
Akua drank.
“There is no after this war,” she said, setting down the goblet. “She loves me more than she hates me, I think, but that is not forgiveness. Never will be.”
Kendi Akaze smiled.
“Ah, Callowans,” he said. “They do have their virtues.”
“Are you satisfied?” Akua asked.
“No,” he replied.
Her jaw clenched.
“I will have no part of Cardinal,” she said. “That is certain. Or of the Confederation of Praes. And there will be no place for me in the lands of the Grand Alliance. Even if I survive I…”
There would be nowhere to go, she realized, perhaps for the first time. She had known it, deep down, but never spoken the truth out loud and made herself face it. Ashur always took Praesi exiles and it should not be difficult to live in the League, but what kind of a life would those be? An exile, sometimes called upon when of use but otherwise kept in the darkest hole they could find. A shameful secret, kept around only in case she was needed. Everything she was growing to hate about where she now stood, only a thousand times more so. I would have once been satisfied with this, she thought. Seen it as a victory, living to begin another rise to prominence.
Now all the prospect made her feel was exhausted.
“You will not be anything but you,” Kendi softly said. “And I can conceive few curses worse than that, Akua Sahelian.”
“So that is your purpose,” she said, tone mocking. “You come here to remind me that I should live so that your tortured sense of vengeance might be satisfied?”
“I don’t care whether you keep breathing, Sahelian,” Kendi said, sounding honest. “I want the vicious, empty thing that killed so many of us and lit the world aflame to suffer. Whether you are to serve as her prison or her coffin is not so important.”
“So why save my life in Ater?” Akua harshly replied. “If you had not removed Malicia’s killing-”
“She would have snuffed you out like a candle,” Kendi acknowledged. “And what right did she have to that, after all she has done? It took more than a single pair of hands to craft the Folly. It would have been disgusting, for the Empress to pretend to pass judgement over you when all know she helped the deed along.”
“So only you can judge me?” she laughed. “How highly you think of yourself, Kendi.”
“It’s not me either,” the man smiled. “I would just burn you, Sahelian. End it, look for peace among the ashes of you. But my sister’s shade demands better. So I will usher you through this journey until you reach your end.”
“I don’t understand what you want from me,” she snarled. “That I open my own throat? That I leap into a chasm? Would it truly mean that much more to you if I did the deed myself?”
“Is that,” Kendi evenly asked, “what you think would even the scales?”
“There’s no evening those scales,” Akua tiredly replied. “Even a fool would see that.”
He watched her in silence
“Even should I live forever and save a life every morning, it would change nothing,” she continued. “It’s not as simple as lives lost.”
She had seen that in Ater, the cascade of suffering her atrocity had begun. The Folly had been an enormity, the amount of death it represented, but that had only been the tree above the ground. There were even greater roots below, out of sight, and how could those even be tallied for? Made up for? Redemption by number was an empty exercise, meaningful only in the abstract.
“So you do nothing?” he asked.
“I am to be jailor to the Dead King,” Akua said. “Bound forever to keep him imprisoned.”
There were still enough of the Twilight Ways for this to be possible. Liesse, it seemed, was not a city she would ever leave behind. He cocked his head to the side.
“And you chose this?”
She did not answer. It would have been a lie to say that she had, though it would have been another to say she had not. He shook his head, disgusted.
“Then it means nothing,” Kendi said. “Will forever mean nothing.”
He rose to his feet, leaving behind a cup of wine almost entirely untouched.
“Just another fate picked out for you.”
Her heart clenched and she turned away, failing to keep her face calm. The mfuasa snorted, killing the light with a flick of the wrist and making to leave. Akua looked out at the walls of Keter, knowing she should keep silent. She did not.
“What was her name?” she asked.
Kendi’s steps stuttered.
“Do you care?” he asked.
Akua looked down at her hands.
“Enough to ask,” she finally replied.
“Sura. Her name was Sura.”
The name echoed in the silence he left in his wake. Akua’s fingers reach for her neck, finding only warm skin for all that she had imagined otherwise. She had felt as if she would find something, as if her fingers would have been able to tell her which it was.
A noose or a knot.
There were not many Rhenians with the army.
Cordelia had only summoned south a quarter of Rhenia’s army at the beginning of the war, leaving the rest to hold the Rhenian Gates and her capital, and of those thousands now only a few hundred were left. The rest were long dead, their lives spent defending people they loved little so very far from home. Cordelia did all in her power to ensure the survivors were all comfortable and provided before she allowed herself to rest. Prince Otto had not neglected them, but the princess felt better for having put a hand to the labour – however scarce the necessity of it.
In truth, if one was to speak of neglect the word should be laid at her feet. How very little she had done for her people, not only Rhenians but all Lycaonese, since the war had begun. That no grudge seemed to be held by her soldiers over the fact she’d not so much as stepped foot in Rhenia during the entire war only worsened the guilt. Gods, sometimes she saw the pride in the eyes of her countrymen and it burned.
“You bargained everything to keep us alive,” Otto Reitzenberg solemnly told her when they drank at the wake. “Even your throne. What more could we ask of you, Hasenbach?”
Coming from the man who had so bitterly fought to keep Twilight’s Pass from falling, it had felt like a slap in the face. All the more for the way she knew he had meant every word, for Otto Redcrown was not what one would call a skilled liar. It was like none of them could see she had abandoned them, named them the sacrifice needed to keep Procer breathing through the first black months of the war. Are we truly so used to doing the dying, she thought, that it no longer matters? It was a dark thought, though far from the darkest she had been left to wrestle with.
Worst of all was the increasingly possible way they were about to lose the war.
Cordelia no longer sat in the war councils. She still had the status to, as a princess, but Malanza would rather bite off her own thumb than sit besides her and had instead taken to bringing Prince Otto to keep the Lycaonese bound to her. Wise, considering how estranged her people had grown from most of Procer during the war. It was not impossible for large swaths of the northwest to secede from the Principate, if the aftermath of the war was poorly handled. If there was an aftermath at all, anyhow. For though Cordelia no longer sat the councils, she still had access to several of those who sat them and to the formal supply documents besides. The picture both painted, when placed together, was a dark one. With the arrival of the dwarves starvation was no longer at risk, but that was no promised victory.
They Grand Alliance was, by Cordelia’s estimation, two failed assaults away from collapse.
It was a broad estimate, relying on a number of casualties equal or greater to those of the first attempt – counting both the field battle and the storm – but she knew it to be correct. Another sixty thousand dead would only lessen the army’s numbers around to half of what had first been brought north, but all the forces here were not equal. Or, for that matter, united. Every nation had its own host, but it was worse than that. The League alone fielded multiple different armies, and Procer still divided itself into the hosts under First Princess Rozala and Otto Redcrown. That was not without sense, but it meant that casualties could not be counted as if the force were a single army.
One of the principles of war her uncle had taught her as a girl had been that an army became unable to fight long before all its soldiers were dead. A host was an intricate machine, needing many different parts to keep functioning: horsemen and skirmishers, regulars and outriders. Losing any of those parts – or even too large a portion of one – could be an army’s doom. That principle, when applied to the Grand Alliance forces, became a curse. Which armies would start collapsing into uselessness first, when casualties kept racking up? Cordelia believed it would be League’s, whose individual armies were smallest and so most vulnerable to this, but she could not be sure.
The war had taught her that when a battle went bad levies died like flies, and Procer’s forces still had an uncomfortably large amount of them.
Two defeats, she thought, and the Grand Alliance would have broken enough of its component armies that it would be impossible to take Keter. That was what her investigations had revealed, the ugly truth behind the coming acts of valour: valour alone would not be enough. Even if the broken armies were thrown into the grinder as expendables, it would not suffice. The coalition would fail and when it did Calernia’s days would be numbered. Procer would fall, dragging with it the rest of the continent. Too many undead, no one left to stop them. And that would leave Cordelia with a hard choice, perhaps the hardest she’d ever had to make.
Bet it all on hope, some unforeseen salvation, or kill many to save the rest.
A mug was pressed into her hand and Cordelia almost started. Agnes was smiling at her sideways, the two of them alone in her tent. The Augur patted her arm.
“You think too much about what you see,” Agnes chided.
Cordelia considered herself a tolerant woman, but the irony in that sentence was too thick for even her to swallow.
“You cannot-” she began, then her eyes narrowed. “You did that on purpose. You are teasing me.”
Agnes looked inordinately proud, nodding as she brushed back her hair. The once-short bob had grown a little longer over the last few months, one of the first changes to her cousin’s appearance since she had become Chosen.
“They always said I’m the funny Hasenbach,” she noted.
Cordelia almost winced. ‘They’ had not meant that nicely as Agnes was understanding it. Being from even a branch line of the House of Hasenbach had ensured that none would dare to harass her cousin even when she had still been known as only a young girl overly fond of birdwatching, but it had not kept her safe from rumours. Or being ignored with varying degrees of politeness. Chasing off the memories, she took Agnes’ hand in her own.
“You are getting better,” Cordelia happily said. “For months now you have been growing into the present.”
Away from the past and visions of what might be.
“It’s a little confining,” Agnes admitted. “Things only have one meaning and I have to listen when people talk.”
“The grand curse of civil society,” she drily replied. “You will get used to it in time.”
“Maybe,” the Augur said, wrinkling her nose, then smiled. “But mead is good. I don’t know why they wouldn’t let me drink at feasts.”
Because your father disappeared down the bottle when your mother died, Cordelia thought, and none of us wanted you to follow him down that hole.
“I cannot imagine why,” she lied.
Agnes shot her a suspicious look, which moved Cordelia halfway to tears. For years now she’d been watching her cousin – the last of her blood, now – wasting away, devoured from the inside by her Choosing. Before she’d left Salia, Agnes would not have been able to read a room enough to be suspicious. Much less express it so openly. Guilt followed, as it so often did these days. I asked so much of you, Cordelia thought. Advice to avoid disaster or steer enemies into it. Only now do I begin to grasp how much it truly took from you. Too much. She would never again ask for augury.
Sometimes it felt like Cordelia had lived all her life taking from others, like some dragon from an old tale gathering all the gold of the world at her feet so she might make a kingdom of her greed.
“Boo,” Agnes muttered. “Boo, Cordelia, booo.”
She swallowed a smile.
“Now you are just going with the fashion, Agnes,” the princess replied. “For shame.”
They both smiled. It had been most of a year now, Cordelia thought, since the two of them only had each other left. Since Uncle Klaus had died, striding out of his life and straight into the legends of the Iron Prince’s last charge. There were still Hasenbachs alive of course, she’d made sure the line would continue. Two distant cousins of hers were in Salia and one more in Rhenia itself, but Cordelia had never known any of them more than passingly. They were not family in the way that Agnes was and her uncle had been.
“Your mood is falling again,” Agnes said.
“I fear I might not be very good company tonight,” Cordelia admitted.
“You’re the one I chose,” Agnes shrugged. “What had you looking so sad?”
“I was thinking of family,” she vaguely replied.
The other woman hummed.
“Prince Klaus, then,” she said.
The two of them had never been close, Cordelia knew. There was no shared blood, Agnes found violence repellant and Uncle Klaus had been uncomfortable around powers he did not understand. It had not been a recipe for deep fondness, for all that the two of them had spent years at her side.
“Death leaves so much unfinished,” Cordelia replied.
She had never reconciled with the man who had been something between a father and a grandfather to her while being neither by blood.
“That’s the wrong way to look at it,” Agnes said. “It’s life where you don’t finish things. Death is always complete.”
The fair-haired princess cocked her head to the side.
“I do not follow,” she admitted.
“Death’s a closed circle,” Agnes said. “A single act. Sometimes it matters and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s never…”
She grimaced, groping for words.
“Continuous,” Agnes finished, satisfied. “It’s why you can make something so large of a moment so small: you can’t undo it after by acting the other way. The circle is closed.”
“Is that something you saw?” Cordelia asked. “I thought that these last few months…”
“It’s not the Gods,” Agnes said, shaking her head. “And I haven’t seen much since I left Salia. They understand that sometimes to have to save your strength.”
“Do they?” Cordelia asked, almost accusing.
It had been a long few months, a long few years. Perhaps even a long life. The Augur hummed again.
“I don’t think they understand much, actually,” Agnes mused. “Not like people do. It’s why there’s Good and Evil, so there’s rules, because they do understand rules.”
“Good is not an immovable absolute,” Cordelia said. “Above was once worshipped by those who kept slaves, Agnes.”
“The rules change,” her cousin agreed. “But I think that’s part of what they want too.”
“Many have gone mad trying to understand the Gods,” the princess warned.
“I’ll be all right,” Agnes reassured her. “Since I was already like that.”
The utterly inappropriate laugh that got out of her ripped itself out of her throat as her cousin sat smiling and pleased.
“You need to laugh more,” Agnes told her. “It will do you good. Maybe find a lover.”
Cordelia almost rolled her eyes. As if now was the time for such diversions.
“If we are to speak of lovers,” she said, “perhaps I should be drinking more.”
“My mug is already empty,” Agnes informed her, then batted her eyes.
Cordelia would have refused her, but it had been the better part of a decade since she’d seen her cousin act so much like the girl she’d once been. She did not have the heart to tell her no, rising to her feet and going into the back of the tent – where she did keep a few bottles of wine for guests, and mead for family. At the rate Agnes was going through them, she would run out of the mead before the siege – or the world – ended. The blue-eyed princess chose one of the older bottles and straightened, though she froze when she heard a rattling gasp coming from the other side of the tent.
She hurried back to find her cousin leaning over the table, writing on parchment with a shaky hand.
“Agnes?” she called out.
Her cousin did not reply. She set down the mead on the table and knelt by her cousin’s side, finding the other woman utterly absorbed in her writing – and hiding it from prying eyes. She finished writing after a moment, blew on the ink to dry it, and the folded the piece of parchment. Only then did she take her eyes off it and sag into her seat, breath irregular. Her skin had paled and was beaded with sweat.
“Agnes,” Cordelia quietly said, “what have you done?”
The Augur sought out her hand, threaded their fingers together and squeezed it.
“I saved my strength but it wasn’t enough,” Agnes croaked. “I’m sorry.”
She forced her tone to be even.
“Are you healthy?” Cordelia asked. “Should I call for a healer?”
“I couldn’t see everything,” Agnes said. “Just glimpses. But it doesn’t matter.”
The Augur’s eyes began bleeding and it was no longer a question worth asking. Cordelia shouted for a healer, for help.
“If it’s a bet,” Agnes murmured, “then I always make the same.”
“Agnes,” Cordelia urgently said, “stay awake. I don’t-”
“Don’t read what I wrote until you need to,” the Augur told her. “You’ll know when.”
“Agnes,” Cordelia hissed, cold terror in her gut. “Don’t leave me.”
“I’m sorry,” she replied, smiling and bloody and heart-breakingly pale. “I wish we could have gone home.”
A shiver.
“Don’t follow too quickly.”
By the time the healers ran into the tent, Cordelia Hasenbach was holding the hand of a corpse.
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