The field was lit with funeral pyres and rank with the stench of death and burning flesh. The battle had cost Klia nearly half her remaining force, and the Plenimarans far more, but they had the crucial ford.
Klia’s tent stood just upstream near the burned farmhouse, so Beka set off on foot to make her own report. The waxing moon turned the rising mist to a gently roiling silver blanket spreading up from the river.
She used the funeral fires to guide her over the churned ground. The bodies had been cleared in this area, but the smell of death still hung on the damp night air. She was between fires when she heard low voices nearby.
“You see how the queen throws us into the dragon’s maw?” a man was saying. She couldn’t make out who the dark forms were, or recognize the voice. “Sending her own sister out with less than a full squadron!”
“Half sister,” said another.
“And for what?” a third voice scoffed. “Phoria could have rolled in here with her entire force and swept the whoreson bastards out like spiders out of a drain!”
It was the usual soldiers’ talk, and nothing Beka hadn’t thought herself. She was about to walk on when another said,
“What about the officers, Restus? Whose side would they take?”
“Can’t say about Anri, but from what I’ve heard that redheaded one is Klia’s friend,” another man replied. “I expect she’d take her side of things.”
Beka paused, frowning. Take Klia’s side in what?
“It’d be different if Commander Klia was general, wouldn’t it?” a young-sounding rider asked. “Then maybe she could talk sense to the queen.”
“Mind your tongue, Callin, and keep your damn voice down!”
“And about time, though,” one of the others muttered.
“To better days,” one of the others said, and she heard a murmur of agreement.
This was not the first time Beka had heard the sentiment. There’d been growing discontent since Phoria had refused the Overlord’s offer of a truce. Most of the officers, Klia included, shared Phoria’s belief that they would finally see victory before the summer was over; the state of the enemy’s captured provisions was a good sign. But it was hard to convince the ranks of that, even after a day like this.
Cursing the darkness, she listened for more, but the talk turned to the day’s fighting and no more was said of Klia or herself. After a few minutes they set off in her direction. Beka moved away, then trailed them to see who they were.
There were five of them, and as they stepped into the glow of a nearby watch fire, she recognized Sergeant Werneus of Captain Anri’s Fourth Troop; he’d saved her life that morning. She owed him something.
“Sergeant,” she called out.
Startled, the man turned and squinted through the darkness, then saluted. “Evenin’, Captain. Good to see you’re still in one piece and breathing.”
“And I have you to thank for it,” she replied, coming closer and lowering her voice. “Listen, I overheard you just now and I should report you to your captain.”
Werneus’s men exchanged nervous glances, but the sergeant saluted and went down on one knee. “We meant no harm.”
Beka held up her hand. “Given the good turn you did me, I’m not going to-this time. But don’t ever forget, we’re the
“As springwater, Captain.”
“Good. Blood and Steel, men.”
“Blood and Steel, Captain!” the others replied, fists to hearts.
CHAPTER 6. Ulia
ULIA squatted in the weeds above the breakwater, poking at the dead gull’s shiny gold eye with a twig. It was pretty, and she wished it were a bead she could wear on a string around her neck. But it also meant that the bird was freshly dead.
The child’s bare arms and legs were like knobby twigs themselves, sticking out of the shapeless grey folds of her sister’s cast-off dress. She picked the bird up by one still-supple orange foot and carefully held it at arm’s length so the blood dripping from its gaping bone-colored beak wouldn’t get on her clothing or bare feet. The bird was nearly as big as she was. Even when she held her hand up high, the head dragged on the ground and the broad grey-backed wings flapped clumsily, as if it didn’t want to go in her mama’s stewpot. Ulia looked around quickly, judging the distance across the barren shorefront to the row of sagging tenements where she and her large family lived, and measuring who else was around to see. An older child, or even a grown-up, would take it from her for sure, and then her family would go hungry another night. But there was no one at the moment, except for the bent old woman sitting on one of the granite anchor stones nearby, leaning on a gnarled stick.
Ulia would have avoided her, too, except that the woman was holding something up between her gloved fingers that caught the light and sparkled like sunlight on ice. Curious, Ulia sidled over toward her, arm already aching from the weight of the bird. Keeping out of reach, she craned her neck, trying to see what it was that was sparkling so.
The old woman wore a dress as crude and tattered as her own, and the scarf wound around her head under the brown shawl might have been red once. But Ulia was a child starved for color. Even the gull’s blood was pretty to her. What she could see of the old woman’s face under the kerchief was sun-browned and lined, and she had white whiskers on her chin. As Ulia came closer, she saw that the old grandmother had on the strangest belt; it was made of rope, and had things hanging from it on bits of string: bent spoons, broken hair combs, bones, a bracelet made of dried rosebuds, stones and shells with holes through them. But Ulia’s gaze lingered longest on what the woman still held between her fingers. It was a bit of yellow rock crystal, clear as rainwater, bright as a star in the daytime, prettier than the gull’s golden eye.
“Hello, little one,” the old woman said, giving her a broken-toothed smile.
Ulia warily kept her distance. “Hello, old mother.”
“I see you’ve found your dinner.”
Ulia instinctively tried to hold the gull behind her.
The old woman laughed. “I’ve got my own supper waiting, love. I’m not going to take yours.” She thumped her twisted stick on the ground. “My chasing days are over, anyway, don’t you see?”
Ulia stood on one leg and scratched the back of her calf with the other foot where the seagull’s wing feathers made it itch. “That’s a pretty rock.”
The old woman cocked her head and regarded the crystal. “It is, indeed, but I have so many!” She leaned her stick against the stone and rummaged in the folds of her skirts. At last she found a pouch on a length of fisherman’s twine and dumped the contents into the palm of her glove. White and yellow stones caught the light like sharp crystal teeth. “Would you like to have one?”
Ulia’s eyes widened at that and she let the gull fall and took a step closer, eyes fixed on the sparkling stones. “I can have one?”
As she raised her hand to reach for one, however, the old woman drew her own hand back and closed her fingers around them. “A trade, to keep the bad luck off.”
Ulia glanced back at the gull.
“No, love. I told you, I don’t need your dinner,” the old woman said with a warm chuckle.
What else did she have? The child raised her hand to the little bit of faded blue silk ribbon knotted into a hank of her lank brown hair. It was only a few inches long; her mother had found a long piece trodden into the dirty snow in the marketplace last winter, lost by some wealthy girl. She’d washed it and cut it into five little pieces, one for each daughter, and tied it into their hair in bows that looked like tiny butterflies. Ulia pulled the bedraggled bit of cloth loose, wincing as several strands of hair came with it, and held it out.
The old woman smiled down at her, holding Ulia’s gaze as she took it. Her fingers brushed the girl’s and for an instant Ulia felt the slightest hint of a tingle in her chest, as though she had to cough.
The old woman tucked the ribbon away inside her tattered glove and let the child choose the stone she
