know, is your only way out of this misery.”
Fingel said nothing. She hardly ever said anything. Finished with her work, she turned away with the warm water, bloody towels, and shears. She put them down and then checked the small pot of broth she had brewing over a shallow pitch fire.
“They wouldn’t have me, Fingel,” Rialus said. He could not tell if she listened to him at all, so unresponsive was she to his words. He spoke anyway, a habit he took some comfort in, which soothed his occasional stutter right out of his voice. “I tried, but they wouldn’t have me. They sent me back. Told me to bring them more. To them I’m nothing but a traitor.” He watched the shape of her back as she worked. Even bundled under several layers of clothing, he could still make out her figure. He had studied it often enough, and thought of it many a time in erotic fantasies. Why had he never forced her? Because I’m afraid of what that would mean about me. It would mark the end of anything worthwhile in me.
“I wonder if you would kill me if I asked you to. It would be your last act as my slave. I could write a note explaining that I had ordered you to do it, so that you wouldn’t get punished. I wonder if you would.”
And yet he did not make the simple changes to his phrasing that would have made the question the young woman had to answer. Instead he looked at his damaged face in his hand mirror. He slurped the meat broth Fingel had made for him. He waited for the summons he dreaded and anticipated.
I t did not come. Not that day, at least. Not during the following evening, nor in the dark of that night. His station remained immobile, steaming away like a behemoth at rest. He heard movement outside, all the normal sounds. Men shouting, laborers at work. Beasts bellowing. A few times he heard the distinctive chattering of freketes in flight. They seemed louder than usual, more agitated. And yet hour after hour passed without the expected knock on his door or the shout that would call him to explain himself.
On the morning of the second day since the battle, Rialus could not help asking Fingel what was happening outside. She had just returned from some errand. Stripping off layers, she said, “Nothing.”
“Nothing? Where’s Devoth? Why haven’t they called for me?”
He knew she would not answer these questions. He followed them with others that she did not answer either. Eventually, he could not take her silence anymore. He pulled on his furs, yanked tight his hood, and shoved his hands into his mittens. He went out to find the people he most feared finding.
Devoth and the other clan leaders sat at council in the large station outfitted for the purpose. The human guards at the entrance barely noticed as Rialus walked past them. They seemed preoccupied. They talked among themselves. Argued actually. Rialus slipped inside.
The council was in full swing, crowded and contentious. Several Auldek were talking at once, each of them vying to be the center of discussion and none of them managing it.
“I told you we were too many,” Calrach said. When nobody listened, he slammed his palm on the table. “You forget that we Numrek did this journey before, fought these Acacians before. I told you it was foolish to display the whole army in front of them. Now you see why. We can do nothing with so many against so few! We should be more selective.”
To this, Skahill offered the slight that the Numrek had made this crossing before, but they did so like thieves in the night, with no one to oppose them until they were welcomed as guests, given a fortress and a steaming chamber to feast in. Considering that, what did Calrach know about how to fight the war they were fighting, up here, on the ice? “You want to be more selective. Perhaps we should send the Numrek to do battle by yourselves, all eleven of you. Will that shut your mouth?”
“I would do it with joy,” Calrach ground through his teeth, no sign in his visage of the joy he spoke of. “Not everyone is so afraid to die as you.”
“Afraid! Anets were in the front lines. We pleaded for the cowards to fight us.”
“So you say. Perhaps you pleaded them to bend you over and-”
Skahill shot to his feet, slamming a fist on the table as he did so and roaring in wordless rage. Calrach shoved the man next to him as he began coming around the table. Skahill did the same, upsetting chairs and the people in them, clawing with one hand for his dagger.
Faster than Rialus could follow with his eyes, Sabeer went from sitting to crouching on top of the table, with an arm thrust toward either man. Each fist clenched a curved crescent of steel. She stayed that way a moment, lean and gorgeous. Utterly terrifying. “Stop it! Keep bickering and I’ll take you to death myself. Say another word in anger. Either of you. Just one more word…”
Neither man took her up on that. They continued to glare at each other, but they held their tongues and crashed back into their seats. If they had not been warriors they could have been chastened, angry children.
What in Hadin’s name is going on here? Rialus wondered. He had never seen the Auldek so ill-tempered. Herith glared at Sabeer’s back as she climbed down from the table. Or so melancholy. Millwa leaned forward on the table, his head cradled in his hands. Or so distressed. Jafith… Well, if Rialus had not found the idea impossible, he would have said that Jafith had been crying recently. And Devoth wore a look of profound perplexity written on the lines of his forehead and with the vague, unfocused way his gaze floated without fixing on anything.
What in Hadin’s name? Rialus avoided the empty seat at Devoth’s side. His seat. He slunk around the edge of the chamber and found a stool that hid him behind the bulky shoulders of several of the chieftain’s assistants. There he listened. As the chieftains paid those behind them no mind, he even scooted up beside the assistants and whispered questions to them. In the hours that followed, he pieced together a mental mosaic of what had transpired.
The battle had not gone well for the Auldek at all. Instead of a day of glorious slaughter, they had experienced one of confusion, frustration, humiliation, and even an Auldek death. This latter thing it took him some time to understand. He could not picture how it came about, but somehow Mena had cut through most of Howlk’s neck in midair, both of them riding on Nawth’s back. The impact from his fall finished the job, sending his head twirling across the ice, through the feet of the high-stepping, horrified Auldek. His body spasmed through death after death, all his lives tearing themselves out of him in one long agony. The Auldek who saw this from up close- including Jafith-were shaken to their cores.
Nawth did not die from the fall, but he was so crippled that the clan chieftains had decided he would have to be abandoned. Freketes could not be killed for some sacred reason that Rialus could not fathom, but neither could injured ones be kept alive. Their bones do not heal, apparently. Nawth would never be anything more than broken. Better he be dead, then, by Auldek logic.
Incredible. And there was more.
The things he heard stoked the fires of rebellion inside him. The Auldek could make no sense of the tactics Mena had employed, but he could. He saw the results of the things he had told Mena in all of it. She had cut the amulet off Nawth’s neck because he had told her she should. Right? Of course. Yes. She had avoided fighting the Auldek because he had told her about their impenetrable body armor. And she had sent volleys of arrows into the slave flanks because he had said they would be vulnerable. It all seemed so obvious to him. His culpability swam in his head, making him dizzy.
I did this, he thought. I helped this…
“Rialus leagueman!” Devoth’s voice snatched him up from his paroxysms of self-congratulation. He had quite forgotten himself, and was stunned to find all the chieftains gazing at him. “Come to my side,” Devoth said.
When Rialus managed to reach him, after stumbling over stools and having to squeeze among bodies that stubbornly did not move to let him pass, Devoth said, “Where have you been?”
Exactly the question Rialus had feared. His short-lived euphoria evaporated, replaced by the dread he had become so used to. “I-I’ve been trying to understand.”
“You and all of us. Why do they not fight us, Rialus?”
Feeling his pulse quicken, Rialus picked up the stylus on the table before him as if he had just remembered something he needed to make a note of.
“Tell me. You know them. Why will they not fight us as they should? Are they cowards? Have we come across the roof of the world to fight cowards?”
No, you’ve come across to die, Rialus thought. He said, “Yes, they are cowards. Look no f-f-further than that. They’re cowards.”
Devoth did not seem to have heard. “It’s like they are wolves and we the prey. They attack our weak points, the lame, the young. They avoid the strong. I did not expect this.”
“Don’t compare them to wolves,” Herith said. “The Wrathic are not cowards.”
