Jengthir flinched. He turned and muttered something to the men, gestured down the slope. They went, but not particularly fast, and with resentful glances cast back across their shoulders every second step. Ringil caught each glance and stared it back down. He could feel the command begin to unravel around him. Could not make himself much care.
At his feet, weak, coughing laughter.
He looked down. Poppy Snarl had propped herself up on one shaky elbow, was working to fold her legs back under her. Her mouth was broken and bruising fast across one corner; blood had run and crusted there. One eye was swollen almost closed, and there were bites everywhere on her exposed flesh.
Lost the taste for your vengeance, have you, Eskiath? She folded her arms across herself. She was starting to tremble, but still she stared up at him defiantly. Fucking rich kids, you re all the same. No guts when it comes to the crunch. Spoiled stupid little Glades-blood queer. Findrich and the rest are so fucking wrong about you. You re soft as pox pus.
It isn t my vengeance, he told her distantly.
Oh, yes. She bared her teeth, spat at his feet.
Poor little Sherin. Is this what she wanted done, then?
No. She just asked me to kill you. Ringil took the dragon-tooth blade from his sleeve. He crouched to Snarl s height. She didn t say anything about protecting your honor until I did it, though.
Honor. An awful bubbling laugh came up out of Poppy Snarl s throat. Oh, but how the other half live. Honor? You think, you really think this is the first time I ve been raped? You think it s the tenth time, maybe? The twentieth?
I don t care, Poppy.
Fuck you, Eskiath. You think I would have lived past fourteen fucking years old in harbor end if I d broken as easily as your little bitch cousin? You tell them back at House Eskiath I was a dozen times the woman Sherin ever was, and before I was half her fucking age. You tell them I said that.
No, I won t, Ringil said quietly.
I ll tell them you died screaming and begging for mercy.
Well, you always were a fucking liar. She jerked her chin up at him, bared her throat, and sneered. So what are you waiting for, you mincing aristo cunt? Get it done, why don t you.
Afterward, he left her body where it lay and went down to stand among the coffles she had owned. Around him, the mercenaries went about with manacle cutters and much bad grace, setting free the slaves and throwing stale bread at their feet. None who passed him would meet his eye.
The men under your command may well hate you, he d once written, in a treatise on modern warfare that never saw publication. And who can blame them? They see you dine on fine wine and meat while they subsist on gruel. They sleep under canvas and you under silk. They make do with rusting hand-me-down mail while you gleam in personally tailored plate. And where battle is joined against known and human foes, they know that if captured, you will likely as not be feted by noble commanders on the opposing side and ransomed safely home, while they will likely be tortured, mutilated, or killed.
Who, without the careful massaging of illusory tribal pride or the promise of rape and pillage, would not hate their commander under such circumstances?
Of course, the Scaled Folk had come along and changed a lot of that. They didn t differentiate grunt-level soldiery or noble flesh, apparently it all tasted pretty much the same to them. Stumbling on the barbecue pits and cracked and blackened human bones the lizards habitually left behind at their camps, the League s soldiers acquired a sudden, icy understanding of their common humanity and what it stood against. They were no longer fighting to plant a flag somewhere pointless, to avenge this or that slight to honor in the endless squabbling negotiations of the various noble families and city fathers who owned every fucking thing the eye could see.
They were fighting not to be eaten.
The clean, cold clarity of it washed over the young Ringil Eskiath at the time a sinecure-posted junior liaison officer with Trelayne s Majak mercenary units like bathing at the Falls of Treligal. Where other men, other commanders from the noble families of the League, recoiled in horror before the change, Ringil embraced it like the tight-muscled torso of an unexpected back-alley lover.
It carried him through the war. It sent him up against the lizards at Gallows Gap fully expecting to die, and it made a hero of him instead.
And then, in the sick-to-the-stomach, hungover morning light of their victory over the Scaled Folk, like so many of those tight muscled back-alley lovers over the years, the promise of change melted from his side, and was gone.
At the time, it took him a while to understand what had happened. He was still young back then; he really had believed in the change. But as the norms shifted again, back to what had been before or near as fuck, his enduring belief started to get in the way. Later, it came close to killing him. Came closer in fact than the Scaled Folk had ever managed toward the end, it had taken Archeth s intervention to save him, to wake him to the fact that they d saved humanity from the lizards so that said humanity could go right back to wallowing in the same pit of ignorance and oppression it had seemed so comfortable with before.
He walked away.
Away from the honors and the offers, away from the collapsing unity between League and Empire, away from the thousand petty squabbles and land grabs the war had degenerated into. He spat out what he could of the taste the war had left in his throat, and among many other pointless exercises sat down to write his treatise.
Hate, then. Since it s so fucking popular again.
But hate, he reminded his putative audience of young, up-and-coming noble commanders, is a curious emotion, often akin to love, in fact resembling love much as your image in the distorting mirror of a penny shriek- house resembles you. And even more curious in the white heat of combat, the shriek-house of men killing and dying for causes undefined, passage across that mirror surface is sometimes possible. Make that transition, step through somehow, and their hate for you may transform, as well, into a pure, consuming love for which they may well follow you and give their lives .
It was, he d readily admit, weird beyond belief, but he d seen it happen that way, more than once, in the raging chaos of the war, like quicksilver magic, like so much else that happened to him in those years. Twisted, and wonderful, and strange.
But that was the war and that was then.
Here and now, on the scrub-plain borderlands outside Hinerion, with a ragged band of the cheapest mercenary castoffs his depleted purse could buy, there would be no transformations. There would be no wonder.
He was trapped behind the mirror, and he knew it.
So he watched the freeing of the slaves, and tried not to feel, as his men evidently already did, that it was all a colossal waste of time.
Tried not to feel at all.
The slaves themselves seemed for the most part to have reached a similar state of numbness. Some few scrambled to their feet as soon as the chains came off, grabbed the bread they were thrown, and hurried away toward the fringes of the forest in ones and twos, glancing back over their shoulders all the way; others, mostly the women, grabbed at the hands of their liberators and tried to kiss them or wept. And got startled curses and shruggings-off for their efforts. But these were the minority. Most just took the food and gnawed at it where they sat, staring into some hollow distance they d excavated for themselves during their captivity. Perhaps they didn t believe what was happening; perhaps they thought it was a trick. Or perhaps they no longer cared one way or the other. Certainly, if they grasped the fact they were free, it didn t seem worth very much to them.
Ringil who d seen a lot of what freedom this world had to offer, and still somehow found himself standing here empty with a raped woman s blood on his hands had to wonder how far wrong they actually were.
The sun climbed in the east, chased out the last of the night s cool. The events of the dawn seemed to recede with the change, as if the butchered corpses of Snarl and the legate and their men were detritus left by some battle in a ghost realm just parallel to the real world. Ringil shook off a shiver at the thought, at memories attached to it, and tried to soak up some of the new sun s warmth. There was a tiny personal drumming in his ears, more felt than heard, and his vision seemed abruptly darker. Another shiver. He wondered glumly if he might be coming down with a cold.
