Canticle

she did not want to ever experience it.

After he left, she slipped into her sleep shift and laid Jakob into the crib beside her bed. Rudolfo would be up late into the night and would probably not sleep until sometime after dawn. He would be working to save what kin- clave he could with Pylos and Turam, though she was certain his effort there would be fruitless. Still, he would try because he always saw the right path and chose it. She would not see him tonight, though some part of her needed to. Some part of her that she was unfamiliar with wanted to smell him, to feel him warm and near her. He’d been away for too long. Still, he was an influential man. He could belong to the Named Lands tonight and she could hope for tomorrow.

She did not realize that she slept until she felt a warm hand encircling her, stroking her bare stomach beneath her shift. She felt the messages pressed into her soft skin as gooseflesh rose upon her. My sunrise.

She stirred awake and inhaled the scent of Rudolfo’s hair. “I can’t stay long,” he whispered into her ear. His hand moved again. My truest path.

“I’m glad you’re home,” she told him and rolled over to pull him into her arms.

And for a time, she let go of her worry about what came toward them from the gathering storm clouds and savored this moment as a gift of great value.

Lysias

Lysias stared at the scout magicks and the poisoned knife before him and willed focus into his hands and feet for what was to come.

He’d been suspicious before Vlad Li Tam called for him. He’d seen the look of ecstasy upon Ignatio’s face when Petronus fell beneath the woman’s blade, and it had set him to thinking.

A conspiracy large enough to bring down Windwir would involve infiltrations at key levels across nations, and the Marshlands had fallen too quickly for it to have been a fledgling movement.

He’d arrived to the Kinshark just after dusk and listened to Vlad Li Tam reading from a slender volume. The man had changed, latticed now in scars and meek of voice. Initially, he made no eye contact and kept to his book. He was nothing like the arrogant, confident man Lysias remembered from the night they’d met near the ruins of Rachyle’s Bridge. Vlad Li Tam had given him the means to end the war by bringing down Resolute and Sethbert, and later that night, Lysias and Grymlis had helped Resolute to his end.

The broken man had read him several pages, then met his eyes briefly. The rage and anguish there nearly matched what Lysias felt as he heard the words.

Now, he lifted the knife and opened the pouch. He’d not been under the scout magicks since his days in the Academy, but he remembered well how it felt. He threw the powders at his shoulders and his feet, then licked the bitterness from the palm of his hand, bracing himself for what was to come. His stomach lurched, and he vomited onto the floor of his tent.

Everything bent around him, and the world moved beneath his feet. The sounds of the camp outside grew to a roar, and his own beating heart kept time like a marching drum.

He sucked in his breath and felt the strength moving through him.

Setting off at a run, he took the course he’d walked out carefully earlier that afternoon when he’d decided what he must do. There was only one answer, though after he gave it there would be no turning back.

Still, he would take this right path.

Ignatio’s tent was guarded lightly, but not by soldiers. The spymaster used his own men for that, and Lysias did not mind dispatching them. Before their bodies stilled, his hand was upon Ignatio’s mouth and his blade was at his throat.

“I know who you are and what you’ve done,” he whispered into the struggling man’s ear.

He called up Vlad Li Tam’s voice now, reading from the book. About the cult in the north and Tam agents planted within the Order, about Y’Zirites in high places. About the daughter of an Entrolusian general who was to be widowed and bereft of her child in order to nursemaid another. About a blood bargain made to spare that Gypsy Prince’s life and prepare them all for the advent of a Crimson Empress. As he remembered, he felt the rage, and in that rage, he found resolve.

“I know what you’ve done, Ignatio,” he said again, “and you pay for it tonight.”

Ignatio bucked against his grip, and Lysias used his own body weight to keep the man pinned. He pricked the knife against the skin and waited for the kallacaine to take effect. He held the spymaster tightly as his struggles slowed, and then just as he went slack, Lysias reached for the pouch of scout magicks and tipped the remainder of the powders into Ignatio’s open mouth.

As he faded from sight, Lysias lifted the paralyzed man onto his shoulder and staggered out into the snow.

He moved carefully through the camp, staying close to the shadows and rehearsing his petition to Rudolfo. After tonight, he was finished on the Delta. He would hope for mercy from both the Gypsy King and his own daughter.

And he would hope that tonight’s work would redeem him in his own eyes, too.

He reached the river quickly and laid Ignatio down in its shallows. He placed him on his back and drew close enough to the spymaster that he could just barely see one wide and frightened eye close to his own. “You killed my daughter’s child, you blood-loving shite,” he said in a low and matter-of-fact voice.

After, he tipped the man over onto his face in the water and stood over him. He placed a boot upon the back of Ignatio’s head and pushed him firmly to the bottom of the shallows.

He stood silent for a time, holding him there, until he was certain of his work.

Then Lysias pushed the body into the current and turned back for the Gypsy Camp.

Chapter 25

Vlad Li Tam

Vlad Li Tam leaned on his shovel and tried not to look at the canvas-wrapped body. Still, eyes took him there against his will and then filled with tears-also against his will. The sun rose east of them, turning the distant Keeper’s Wall purple and pink.

They’d sailed with her in the Kinshark specifically for this, but he’d wanted to wait until sunrise. So he’d visited his new grandson and then slept, tossing and turning against the noise of his dreams. Then, he’d arisen to wake Baryk, and they’d carried her and their tools north of the camp to bury her away from all but the eye of Rudolfo’s magicked scouts.

Later, he would speak with the Gypsy King, though a part of him dreaded it after two weeks of avoiding Rudolfo’s watchful eye.

He cleared as much dirt as he could from the hole he’d started. Across from him, Baryk waited with the pickaxe ready. The others had offered to help, but he and Baryk had refused them. Instead, the bereaved husband and father worked together to carve out a grave for Rae Li Tam here among the dead of a city and a way of life that were no more.

It was the only proper choice that they work together, even as they had sat with her to watch her slowly die, still wrapped in the blood magicks that forced them to see her only in memory.

Even at the end, when the pain kept her weeping, she’d given herself completely to the work of finding a cure for her nephew and had died while Baryk napped beside her, an open book upon her invisible chest.

Vlad Li Tam felt the grief stabbing at him and looked up, nodding to Baryk. The gray-haired warpriest swung the pick down, breaking up the frozen ground for Vlad’s shovel.

Again, he tried not to look to her, stitched there in the canvas, and he failed. I remember your first steps, he told her in the deeper places he rarely visited. And your first words. He remembered her last words, too, though he’d not known at the time that they were such.

He’d sat beside her that last night before she died, and she offered no poetry, no celebration of her love. Instead, she squeezed his hand. “Grow your pain into an army,” she told him.