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
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.
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
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.
