Teer had been planning on doing that anyway, but he wasn’t going to argue with the reminder. The exact terms and nature of his relationship with Kard were strange and uncertain. He wasn’t going to tell the man about the purse Hardin had given him—between the stones and the coins, there’d been almost twelve stones’ worth of cash in it.
That was the entire annual salary of one of the ranch hands. Teer had saved up a chunk of his own salary as well, which meant he had just over sixteen stones of coins hidden in various places throughout his saddlebags.
It took half a candlemark for them to get the horses settled, checked over and fed. Only then did they start to set up the fire to cook their own dinner. As Teer finished stacking wood in the stone-lined firepit—they were not the first people to camp in the little gulley at the side of the road—Kard started going through the packages Anthor had put together for them.
“I think your family might like you more than mine ever did me,” the Spehari concluded as he pulled out a package of premixed stew with instructions written on it in what Teer recognized as his mother’s careful handwriting.
“That’s just what ma prepares for the riders and keeps on hand,” he admitted. “She said it was easier to dry a bunch of jerky and vegetables and put in a bag with spices than to make trail bread.”
“Easy isn’t the word I’d use,” Kard told him. “Efficient, maybe.”
“I’m not sure Ma would know that one,” Teer admitted after a moment. “And she did most of my teaching.”
The Spehari nodded as he set up a tripod kettle silently.
“Makes sense,” he conceded. “I learned out west. Longer ago than I think you realize.”
“You said you were at the landing?” Teer asked, trying to guess the age of the man sitting next to him.
Kard exhaled a long sigh and waved a hand at the fire. Teer saw red sparks flicker from the Spehari’s hand and land in the wood as the fire suddenly heated up.
“I said half the Spehari still living were,” he noted carefully. “Even then, I was figuring I didn’t want to get in the habit of lying to you. We’ve started off with enough lies as it is.”
That wasn’t what Teer had been expecting, and he looked at the kettle silently. If he remembered the instructions, they’d add the mix once it was boiling and leave it all in for a quarter-candlemark. They’d be sitting by the fire for a while.
“Lies?” he finally asked.
“You didn’t guess from the fact that I gave you a different name than I gave everyone else?” Kard asked. “There were secrets and truths I promised you. Now’s as good a time as any, I suppose.”
He stared into the fire.
“I am not Spehari,” he finally began. “My father was Spehari. My mother was a Merik woman. I didn’t know her. She died in childbirth. I am El-Spehari, a halfblood.”
Teer had heard the term before, but only in one context.
“Like the Prince in Sunset?” he demanded. The Prince had been El-Spehari, the governor of a northern Zeeanan province who’d rebelled against the Spehari. The entire Sunset Rebellion had been fought because of an El-Spehari.
“Exactly,” Kard agreed. “I rode with Sunset, Teer. You have to know that first. Your father died in the war?”
“Battle of Otaka,” Teer said slowly. He saw Kard wince in response to the name, then grimly nod.
“There is a decent chance I killed your father,” Kard said flatly. “If not by my own hand, then by my orders. I was at Otaka.”
Teer turned away from the fire and the man he’d bound his life to, looking up at the rising first moon. Part of him wanted to be angry at Kard for that, but…he wasn’t. It wasn’t even that he was numb. It was that he was so angry at the Unity, he couldn’t spare any for the Unity’s enemies.
“You fought him,” Teer finally said, trying to put into words what he felt. “That was war. You might have killed him. That…too, was war. The Spehari betrayed him.”
“The Spehari betrayed a lot of people,” Kard said after a moment. “That was what the whole cursed war was about. We thought we were right.” He shrugged. “We lost, so most take that as a judgment of who was actually right.
“Do you know what the Midnight Proclamation is, Teer?”
Teer shook his head.
“It was the King in Winter’s order after the war was over and the El-Spehari leading the Rebellion were defeated,” Kard told him. “No more El-Spehari are to be born. Those of us who remain were to return to the City of the Pillars and submit to a magical binding, similar to the one you now have with me, only more powerful.
“Any who refused were to be put to the sword and the fire.”
“You refused,” Teer said. It wasn’t even a guess. He could feel the old anger Kard was holding.
“I refused. I rode with Sunset. I would not bow again to Winter.” The El-Spehari sighed. “They need the El-Spehari. The Spehari themselves don’t bear many children. Pairings between Spehari men and the various Aran people’s women are not incredibly fruitful, but they bear more children than those between the Spehari themselves.”
The water boiled and Kard emptied the stew package into the pot, stirring it silently while both men thought.
“The El-Spehari are like mules,” he noted. “We are barren—though long-lived, like our fathers. There is an Inquisition now that hunts the remaining El-Spehari rebels. I don’t know how many like me there are. I spend my life wearing a false face, after all.
“I know most of my friends and comrades from the war are dead,”
