CHAPTER XXXII

The pace of the river quickened with the passing days as it narrowed and deepened and the land about became more rocky. It demanded all the skill of the rafters, but also carried them more swiftly, so that they often reached the next flag-marked camping site with much of the day to spare, and twice overshot it altogether, causing acrimony and weary marches into the evening for the footsoldiers.

The moon had been new when they left Dernang; now it rose in the deep night and stood high in the morning sky, diminishing dawn by dawn. It had been three days since anyone had sighted the occasional scouts that shadowed them on the eastern shore, sent out from Dwei Ontari’s cavalry, moving south through Alwu. Gar Sisu, travelling with the rafts, had been set to divine for the Dwei lord. They had, however, made contact with couriers from another of Prince Dan’s lieutenants, a Lady Dwei Liu, who had moved to secure the crossings of the Shihpan River against possible imperial movements north, as bidden, and sent her imperial cousin promises of her continued support—and proclamation throughout Shihpan of the falsity of the empress’s claim to godhead and the coming of the heir of the gods.

Ghu still went to the rafts every few days. Ahjvar followed, now, though it was hard to endure. Too small a space, no way to escape the nearness of other people, and on another level of irritation entirely, the chopping of the raft through the water made him feel vaguely sick, though it was nowhere near as bad as being on the open sea, crossing the Gulf of Taren on a ship, which he had done once, and once only.

By night, there were fogs over the camp, and the breath of them lingered through the day, even under blue skies. That, at least, was Ghu, and not wizardry, and Ahjvar did not think it was the fog itself that shrouded them. The fog was only what he might shape as walnut, yew, rowan—secrets and shadowy illusion and protection interwoven, drawn softly over them and nightly renewed.

He and Ghu were both ashore and among the rearmost company the evening that a pair of exhausted scouts returned from a cast far ahead, horses hard-ridden and failing. They were two day’s march from the ferry at their current pace. To the south, steep hills rose harsh against the sky. Somewhere there the Wild Sister earned her name, plunging through a gorge that, so legend told, had been torn through the hills by the birth-throes of a dragon, draining the great lake that had drowned the land. The same dragon who had been tamed and broken to obedience by the goddess of the river long before she ever was lost into the Mother. The same whose bones had been the first foundation laid for the castle of the White River Dragon after death in some battle against . . . no one remembered what. An ancient darkness of the dawn of the world. Usually conflated with the seven devils, but the tales had been ancient when Yeh-Lin was a girl, she said. And another story said it was the Wild Sister herself who was the dragon.

It was Ivah came back down the line to find Ghu.

“Captain Lin needs you,” she said briefly. “Will you come, holy one?”

“What?” Ahjvar demanded, as they swung away to bypass the road. Not immediate threat; she carried her own bow cased. Half the march was already spread into the camp. A good time for an attack, but there was no alarm ahead.

“Imperial forces have both ferry landings.”

“Dwei Ontari?”

“They found a wounded man who’d gotten over the river, stole a fowler’s skin boat after he escaped an imperial patrol. He was one of Ontari’s scouts. He said Lord Ontari must have had enough warning the road was held there, because he never came to the ferry. Yeh-Lin’s trying to see.”

“A raid, an army?” Ahjvar demanded. “Or treachery? How secure is Alwu?”

Some old woman of the Dwei Clan was the Kho’anzi, if he remembered correctly, but she had ceded authority, in most practical matters, to Lord Ontari in Prince Dan’s name. She had sons and adult grandchildren, though, and their commitment to the past winter’s failed revolt . . . He wouldn’t rely on it, whatever faith Dan might have. The young had more to lose in a lost cause, and Dan and Daro Korat must certainly look like that, outside the reach of those who saw and recognized their god. He didn’t understand faith anyway, mistrusted it in Dan, in Ivah, in Daro Korat. It baffled him. His trust in Ghu was something entirely other. Had to be. Grown over years. Part of himself.

“Dan says this will be some raid up from Numiya, either Lai Clan loyal to the Kho’anzi of Numiya or imperial conscripts under the high lord’s officers. The border’s very close.”

“I want to know where Dwei Ontari is.”

“Yeh-Lin said you would.” Ivah’s voice didn’t give away her own opinion. “She’s searching. We don’t know anything. I don’t, anyway. She sent me for Ghu before she had asked many questions. She told Lord Ontari’s scout the holy one would hear his report.”

Numbers, Ahjvar wanted to know. And what they were, horse or foot, archers. What they had on the water, what kind of defences they had taken or raised, how long they had had to prepare . . .

“Scouts,” he said. “Patrols down the river.”

“She’s doing that, yes.” Ivah didn’t quite roll her eyes, but her careful mouth tucked up a smile. “I thought you claimed to be an assassin, not a captain.”

He shrugged. Realized how very little he liked having Ghu—and himself, but his impulse for himself would be to simply ride away—engulfed in this herd. Not comfortable and not safe, not a safety he could take on himself to ensure, no matter what scouts and patrols were out about them to watch the land.

What simple tents they had were going up, the first companies in already at their cookfires, as Ahjvar and Ghu followed Ivah’s grey up the central laneway of the camp. The weeds were already trampled into earth. Yeh-Lin, Prince Dan, Yuro, a handful of lords and officers, waited at one fire, folk of Yuro’s following—mostly former stable-hands with no official title—and Lady Ti-So’aro’s were scattered out, marking out a private space more effectively than any tent could.

The alleged scout of Dwei Ontari’s forces was hunched by the fire, an arm swathed in clean bandages, a cup in his other hand. A boy, not a man, and his cheek torn and black with bruising, too, as if he had rolled down rocks.

They rode right to the fire. Yuro rose to take Snow’s bridle, give Ghu a nod that was a lord’s hasty and respectful greeting, not in any way self-conscious. A couple of his girls darted in to lead the horses off.

The scout was looking up at them doubtfully, but when Yeh-Lin flowed to her feet to make a graceful bow, he staggered up and did his best. Ghu caught him, hand under his arm, as he stumbled. The boy was shivering and his face, where it was not bruised, was the colour of greasy clay. Whatever those bandages hid was ugly.

“Sit, Gar Oro.” Ghu helped him down, settled on his heels before him. “You’re safe here. Lady Lin’s had someone tend you?”

“I saw to him myself,” Yeh-Lin said. “He won’t lose the arm after all, but we should tuck him up by a nice warm fire so soon as he’s told all he knows.”

“Is he truly Ontari’s man?” was what Ahjvar wanted to know.

“Oh yes, and if there is any betrayal in Ontari’s vanishing, he knows nothing of it. He risked much to come so far up the river and cross in search of the prince and the holy one, believing it was what his lord would have wished and having no way of knowing if any other message might have been sent. The village just below us, where he stole the boat, is Dwei and its banner-lady had joined Dwei Ontari as he passed, but the boy didn’t want to risk discovering its overseer had decided otherwise. We’ll put a half-company of Dan’s men over by raft in the morning, to make sure it remembers where its loyalties lie. They may even know where Ontari will have gone. Don’t loom over him like that, dead king. Even if he is Wind in the Reeds, he would fall over before his knife could touch your horseboy. Gar Oro,” she addressed the scout in Nabbani again, “now that the holy one is come, tell us all.”

Gar Oro drained the last of whatever they had given him, set the cup carefully aside. His report was delivered with equal care. He had witnessed the imperial forces crossing the Wild Sister to the western ferry landing, seen the dozen Dwei retainers who manned the ferry and the courier post on the eastern shore beheaded, their bodies, and those of two imperial couriers as well, thrown into the river. The couriers were by tradition held to be neutral and untouchable, because even in civil war, lords must speak with lords. Had this been murder or had they defended the post against the forces from Numiya rather than standing aside? Gar Oro did not know.

There was only the one ferry, held against the push of the current by chains cast in bronze and wizardry, and in the time that he observed only a single company of footsoldiers and crossbowmen were assembled on the western shore, where they began to erect a palisade across the road, as if they would enclose and fortify all the landing. There was the ruin of an old watchtower on the steep and barren outcroppings of rock that began to rise as the river dropped. A jagged, broken land began there, much of it unclimbable except perhaps for goats, but they seemed to be trying to make the tower secure. An outpost for archers over the road. But on the east there were the banners of the empress and the high lord of the Lai, and he had counted two hundred banner-lords and perhaps two thousand men, imperial soldiers and Lai retainers of the banner-lords. Their camp was set with its back against the broken hills, with the river where its white waters began to guard their left. There was a ditch and palisade going up, enclosing road and the little village of a dozen huts that served the ferry post. The fortified house had been taken for the commander, who was, the scout thought, a lord of the Lai.

They had horse, yes, he said, in answer to Ivah, but only one company, the lord general’s escort. Numiya was not a province of pastures, Yeh-Lin observed, but of ploughlands. It did not breed riders.

Yeh-Lin asked what little more needed asking—what the scout could guess of the manner of their patrols, if there were wizards of the imperial corps among the Lai lord’s officers, what other vessels they might have access to besides the ferry. Patrols were mostly on foot, with a few mounted, he thought, and there was at least one blue robe that he had seen in attendance on the Lai lord, before he himself was seen and hunted and lost them in the night and the riverside scrub. There were canoes and a few fishing boats in the ferry village, a few skin boats, nothing of any size. They could still have carried more men over to the west, yes. Many more, but the area they had been enclosing there was small.

“They won’t abandon the east,” Yuro said. “They’d risk cutting themselves off from Numiya. They only want to secure the western landing. Probably the idea is take southern Alwu for the empress, annex it for the Kho’anzi of Numiya, force any movement out of Choa to go down the highway and over the Shihpan, through Vanai and Jina.”

He might be illiterate, but Ahjvar had seen him with Daro Korat and Daro Raku, and a table spread with the sort of maps Yeh-Lin claimed were forbidden to leave the imperial library but in the possession of a wizard assigned to an imperial general—not an artist’s story but the land as a bird or visionary with a mirror might see and measure it.

“We have the numbers,” Dan said.

“On the wrong shore,” said Lord Zhung Ario.

Ghu, who had been silent, only nodding now and then and making some encouraging noise to the weary Gar Oro, looked down to the river.

“My river,” he said. “There is no wrong shore. Someone find Gar Oro a place to eat and sleep, if Lady Lin has done all that’s needed for his wounds. Lin—ask your pages to round up the raft-captains. Yuro, Ti-So’aro, Ario, Dan—we’ll want the captains of the companies. The cavalry and the archers. Ivah—horse-archers?”

“We have some. Most were with Dwei Ontari, though. Men and women of Alwu.”

“Two days’ march yet to the ferry, Yuro thinks.”

“If we go on as we have, holy one,” Yuro said. “But we could move faster.”

And show up with weary soldiers who would still, once they had dealt with whatever enemy forces were on the western shore, need to be ferried over the river, and could they use rafts for that, there where the current strengthened above the reportedly unnavigable gorge? The enemy could pick them off as they landed.

“Wait,” Ghu said. “Wait for the captains.”

And when the captains came to sit around the fire with those who thought themselves the great folk, he laid out what they would do. Ahjvar stood behind, watching them all, the faces attentive, solemn—delighted, a few. Doubting, some.

“You can’t,” Yeh-Lin said, and switched to Praitannec. “You’re not thinking of the weight of the water, the push of it, Nabban. You don’t understand the strength of the river. Even iron bends under the force of water . . .”

Her voice trailed to silence.

“My river,” Ghu said quietly. “Don’t tell me its strength. Ivah will look to the ropes.”

Ivah’s eyebrows went up, but she only nodded.

“Tomorrow,” Ghu said. “Eat, rest. Tell the people. Tomorrow’s will be a long march, and then we’ll begin.”

The stone steps are high, and she climbs them alone to the summit. Red pillars support a soaring roof high above, and the eaves are gilded, bright in the sun. She turns, slow in her heavy robes, brocade of crimson and gold over layers of silk that trail a train. Her golden headdress is rayed like the moon, like the crown of Mother Nabban, and set with pearls rose and white and gold. She rests her hands on the hilt of the sabre in her sash and watches them all so far below, the lords and the ladies, the nobles of the land assembled in the great plaza. The priests, too, in their robes white and brown, the priests of the empress, the warlord and wizard who has brought peace to the wounded land.

They go to their knees, the folk, and bow their faces to the stone.

A cold wind stings tears from her eyes. She shuts them. Cold wind, chill heart.

Don’t leave yourself hollow, a devil says in memory.

Wind rises. She opens her eyes, raises her chin, grips the sabre’s hilt. The wind strengthens, blowing like a storm off the mountains. Robes become banners, rags, streams of snow snaking over the paving stones below, around, over the hunched bodies, which are no more than the undulations of the land, and the waves of the grass, lying near-flat in the wind, and she stands on a hill, one of the old mounds, grave of a forgotten hero. The roof is gone to churning grey cloud, the pillars are leaning stone, minimally shaped; faint lines still trace broad-antlered deer, aurochsen, bear. She staggers against the wind, bare-headed, flings her arms wide, flourishing her sabre, her sheepskin coat flaring like wings, as if she would turn to a hawk and fly.

No! she shouts, and she stumbles to the grey rock, the low one, not old hero-stone but a heart and warm and she crouches, sets her back to it, watching, seeking her enemy.

Show yourself! she calls. Let me see you, and I’ll deny you to your face. Stay out of my dreams.

Empress, he says. Your own dreams, not mine. You know what you are. Daughter. Chosen. Worthy to be mine.

Ivah muttered in her sleep, in the tent she shared with the banner-lady Ti-So’aro and four warriors of her retinue, and rolled over, half-waking. It was the uncertainty of what might come disturbed her unremembered dreams. She did not sleep well, these nights on the river road. Who could?

Ahjvar had grown used to sleeping while Ghu sat wakeful by the water, used to hard ground under him, dew and the river’s fogs dampening his clothes and curling his hair, a chill that once would have set old broken bones to aching but never seemed to bother him anymore. He wished Ghu wouldn’t sit up, because it left him vague and distant, less human, for too long the next day, but maybe it was something he needed, as a snake needed to bask in the sun. He never seemed tired as a man should be after such a vigil. He sat, and Ahjvar slept, and he might wake with Ghu lying open-eyed alongside him, or sitting where he had been like some outcropping of the stone, misted pale like a spider’s web. It wasn’t yet dawn when a touch on his face woke him that night. The moon was past its height, hazed with fog that rose and wavered, filling all the broad valley like a tide.

“We need a boat,” Ghu said, crouching over him.

Ahjvar groaned, tried to bury his head in his arm. He hadn’t been dreaming. Sweet dark depths of dreamless sleep, and he wanted to crawl back there.

“Hey.”

He lipped the hand that burrowed in between face and elbow, then bit it, not terribly hard.

“Idiot.” Ghu rolled him over. “Boat?”

“Don’t have one. Go steal a raft. A change from horses.”

“Wake up, you.”

He considered trying to pull Ghu down on top of him, decided against it and pulled himself up instead, hands on his shoulders. Sat wrapped around him. That proved distracting to Ghu, at least for a few moments. Mouth on his neck, his ear, mouth lingering on mouth. But this was hardly any private place.

“Why a boat?” he asked, and disentangled himself to walk the two steps to the shore, wake himself properly with cold water.

“I want to look at the river.”

He didn’t have to speak his sarcasm, crouched and splashing river water on his face.

“The other shore. Have you ever handled a skin boat?”

“No.”

“Like a canoe, but crankier.”

“Nor a canoe. I can row, you know.”

“Not a boat for rowing. Probably you should just sit still.”

“That, I can do. But are we leaving the dogs behind?” The dogs were there, ears alert, the roots of their curled tails wagging in that gentle, questioning way that meant, us too?

“The dogs will wait over here.” Ghu rubbed both wolfish heads, light and dark. “I don’t quite trust you two not to go off looking for excitement.”

Two tails slowly uncoiled to the straight and then drooped.

“Go find Ivah,” he said, which seemed to cheer them. “I’ll want her, and the horses.” Tails rose and they trotted off. Ivah, wherever she slept, was about to get a cold nose in the ear. Or two.

Ahjvar swept up sword and crossbow, trailed after Ghu upriver, to where the fogs smelt of smoke and horse and humanity and the rafts were grounded in the shallows or moored to those that were. A few of them carried lighter vessels, property of the rafters, double-ended bark-skinned things that rode the water like gulls, but it was the boat the scout had brought over that Ghu sought, and found as if he had, like the dogs, nosed it out, hauled up on one of the rafts. A watchman came walking down across the decks, swaying gently with the river’s motion.

“Holy one.” He acknowledged them without question and gave Ghu a hand unlashing the boat and sliding it into the water, but seemed to consider Ahjvar doubtfully, as an awkward piece of baggage better left ashore.

Not so doubtfully as Ahjvar studied the boat, though. It sat far too lightly on the water for his liking, a framework of woven bamboo covered in hide, wider than the bark canoes, but not so long.

“Up towards the bow,” Ghu said helpfully. “Stay low.”

No thwarts, only a couple of bracing crosspieces, and short paddles shoved in beneath those. He didn’t plummet through the bottom, which he half expected. It was lined with split bamboo and doubtless tanned bullhide fit to cover a shield in. The boat shifted and bobbled as Ghu stepped in behind him, kneeling up on one knee, not sitting to row like the coastal boats of Gold Harbour. The thing spun and shot away, caught in the current in a few quick strokes. Ghu chuckled with what sounded like delight. Ahjvar just kept still. Balance, no different from a horse. Very different from a horse, and like no boat he’d ever used before. Not that he did so except in desperation.

“Want me to take a hand?”

“Just keep an eye out ahead.”

There was a greyness to the east, and the half-moon towards the west making the fog pearly. On the water, they moved in a muffling cloud of night. By the time he saw anything, they’d be on top of it. They seemed to scud like bubbles kicked along by the wind. As if the river breathed and they rode the flutter of its pulse.

Ghu was taking them downriver, not across, and keeping in the strongest flow of the current, too, he judged. They passed the village on the east; smell of pigs and cattle and lingering smokiness. Ahjvar settled back, warily, and the boat did not tip or dive. Relaxed, a little. Oddly, he wasn’t feeling the motion as much as he did on the rafts. The night faded and the fog turned to white banners around them, glowing with captive dawn.

Daylight. He found it hard to judge their speed, but they passed a point where Ghu said, “That’s where we would have camped, but they’ll have to march on.” Their marches so far had been short, though. No great hardship.

He began to wonder if Ghu planned to take them all the way to the ferry. If they got into the current sweeping to the gorge, there would be no turning back. And it was broad daylight; eluding the sight of a distant and possibly dreaming devil would not be to elude keen-eyed watchers on the shore, or their arrows.

An island divided the river ahead, low and marshy, overgrown with tall willow, thick beneath with tangled scrub and some pink-flowering weed clambering through everything. The scent carried on the wind, sweet and harsh in one. The broad, twiggy nests of herons filled some half-dead trees at the gravelly point that faced them like the prow of a ship.

The skin boat swirled sideways and held place, suddenly out of the current. Turned to face the western shore. Tangled, marshy woodland there, too. Ghu turned the boat again. The east, though, was flat water-meadow and more of the steep, forested little hills beyond. No herds grazed, no village smoke rose, but still, at some point in the year it must see use, or it would be gone to scrub as well. Perhaps the interval-land was pasture of the ferry village.

“Here,” he said.

“The swamp will be a problem.”

“Might not be so wet as it looks.”

“Is that the river knowing, or just hope?”

“Where are we without hope?”

“In a swamp with our feet wet.”

“Yeh-Lin is right about the strength of the river. The island will help.”

“Did you know it was here?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Ghu . . .”

“Well, I’m not. Sometimes I know, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes . . . I don’t know if I know, Ahj. I see things . . . Let’s look.”

The woodland continued the length of the island, and half a mile back upriver. Impossible to see from the surface of the water how far inland it ran. Ahjvar caught an overhanging bough as Ghu brought the boat nosing in under the trees. No stony ledges here, but mud and roots and winter-broken boles of some tall bush rising from the water like spears, but they managed not to hole the boat as they snugged it in deep under the branches, probably impossible to see even from the island, and tied it there. Getting out involved crawling like a squirrel through a random jumble of branches and boles and discovering the ground to be fern-hummocks with water between. Ahjvar hoisted himself up onto a branch of the big willow that brooded over all the snarl like a hen on her chickens. Ghu came up after him, more gracefully, less encumbered with weapons. Also shorter and thinner, which made a difference when it came to weaving oneself through branches.

“We can’t march them through this, unless you want to take the time to lay a log-road.”

“Wouldn’t take long if this wetland’s narrow.”

Whatever kind of willow this was, it flung up multiple leaning trunks, reached out branches near-horizontally, seeking light. They made it across two trees before they had to take to the ground again and there it was drier, less tangled. Ghu took the lead, keeping his back to the river. Ahjvar followed, watching the wider field of view while Ghu dealt with finding the immediate path, slipping around bushes, under the snagging pink-flowered whatever-it-was. When Ahjvar seized his shoulder, he froze. Ahjvar moved in close, pointed, but Ghu was already looking where he wanted him to, sliding aside, reaching behind for the hilt of his forage-knife.

Ahjvar kept his hands free. Certainly no place for a sword or the crossbow. For all their care, they were leaving a clear trail behind them, and something else had as well, angling up their way from further downstream, heading, like them, for the higher ground, but with less certainty. Too broad a path for any smaller woodland animals and this was no country for bear or boar. Not broken enough for cattle or buffalo, no sharp-pointed hoofprints in the mud, either. Not the old track of some hunter; the crushed plants were still green. Someone else had come from the river and was trying to strike through. Come up the river? Nobody had passed them in the night, that was certain. If whoever it was had gone down the western channel, odds were they’d have found a canoe or some such vessel hidden like their own.

Ghu gave way to him and they made a slow and near-soundless progress. A muddy puddle in the deep shade of a tree gave them the footprints of two people wearing soft shoes, not horseman’s boots, but they’d come by water, of course.

He doubted any fisher or hunter of the village would wear anything better than sandals, if that, for this season.

The light brightened, trees thinning; the ground, though not rising enough to be noticeable to the foot, was drier. The undergrowth thickened with the strengthening of the light. Coming to the edge of the woods. Narrow enough that they could slash a way through and lay the trunks and brush to make a roadbed in hardly the time it would take to bring up a company or two. Better if the empress’s forces weren’t warned they were coming, of course.

Knife in his hand now, moving very slowly, watching all ways. And up. Up was where a man lay along the broad, sloping branch of one of those willows. Watching up the river road with the patience of the hunter. No weapon ready, though, no bow or crossbow. The other, another man . . . sitting at ease beneath the tree, leaning on it. Ahjvar couldn’t see his face, only one shoulder, the outstretched legs, crossed at the ankle. Rough sandals. The shoes . . . had been replaced. The feet were clean, too clean for anyone who had walked that path in sandals. Their clothes were hempen trousers and smocks, shabby. They could have been any of Prince Dan’s rebels.

Waiting for the army. They might have been scouts sent to count Ghu’s army, judge its pace, if the Lai commander had some warning of their coming, which he might very well have. Gar Oro might not be the only one of Ontari’s scouts to have had too close an encounter with the enemy, and another might not have been lucky enough to escape them. But scouts would not come prepared to join the march and pass as followers of the holy one, and how the Wind in the Reeds knew where to lie in wait . . . with all their careful shielding of their march and the river from wizardrous watching. But perhaps what Ghu could summon, the shadowing essence of the river, was not enough against the empress’s devil. Or perhaps it was simpler than that, rumour travelling down the eastern shore.

He wanted one alive. Not even a whisper, though. Slid his knife away again, touched Ghu’s hand, pointed to the man on the ground. Ghu nodded. Deep breath, running the tree in his mind, branch, handholds, feet, knees. Surged up it, a foot against the angled trunk, sideways to a branch, another, seizing the man’s far arm, flipping him, flinging him—the man twisted, falling, so that he landed crouched on his feet, but Ahjvar kicked him as he rose, knocked his head back, not hard enough to kill—he hoped—followed in as he fell. The man rolled and staggered up, unsteady as a drunk, fumbled a knife. It slipped from his fingers and Ahjvar kicked him down again. He struggled weakly, tangled in the whippy branches of a bush. Ahjvar dragged him out, dropped him facedown in the trampled mud and green, cut his rope belt and used it to lash his arms behind his back. Took the time to tie his ankles, too, since all was quiet beyond the tree. He rolled the man to his back. The eyes wandered a bit and he panted, but he didn’t seem likely to die in the next little while. Went around the tree to find Ghu crouched by a body. Bloody mess, literally. The forage-knife was not a weapon for neatness and Ghu must have been face-to-face with the man when he slashed his neck half through. Ahjvar prodded the narrow-bladed knife dropped in the old leaf-mould. That, and a short sword. Neither showing any staining or oiliness to the blade. Well, you wouldn’t poison a weapon you might have to carry around with you a day or more yet. The sword’s point was bloody, and not with spatters.

“All right?”

Ghu shrugged. “He came up at me like a shark. So fast. I didn’t mean to kill him.”

Ahjvar hooked a finger through a tear in the breast of Ghu’s coat, four fingers broad, and hot and wet beneath. He didn’t think that was the assassin’s blood, though Ghu wore a mask of it. The man must have heard something, probably Ahjvar’s rush up the tree, and been rising into his own attacker. Hadn’t meant to kill him but hadn’t had time to think through any other choice, Ahjvar judged. His fingers were busy with the knotwork buttons of the coat, ears strained for any sound, but there were only the birds of the morning singing, now that the scuffle was over. What had he taught the boy? To defend himself without hesitation for thought. Ghu batted him away.

“He didn’t touch me.”

“Yes, he did.”

The proof was in his slashed shirt beneath the coat, but yes, the main force of the blow had been struck aside. There was a cut running along the ribs, ugly and bleeding more than he wanted to see, welling up and streaming down, but not the deep thrust that would have, and Great Gods Ahjvar felt sick, likely killed him.

They should have backed off. He could have shot the one in the tree and gone after the other himself.

“Doesn’t hurt.”

“It will. Now who needs sewing up?”

But a pad of torn shirt and the rest of the shirt as bandage around the chest to hold it was going to have to do.

“Tattoo,” Ghu said. He hooked his left hand through the sash of the coat to keep his arm steady, with his right, cleaned his knife methodically. “And his soul—I lost it. He was terrified. I don’t know what he saw, but as he died he was suddenly terrified. Of me, of dying, of something else, I don’t know, but I tried to hold him, Ahj; I’d killed him and for a moment he clung on to me, to the road through me, but he was torn away. I—didn’t dare follow. There was—light. White, but murky. Darkness. Like water. A weight. I don’t know.”

Ahjvar would take Ghu’s word for the tattoo. Wind in the Reeds, though. Ghu’s knife had snagged and ripped the fine chain of the man’s badge.

“Sit,” he ordered, but Ghu was already sitting. The blood on his face was drying and cracking. Never an obedient servant, he grabbed Ahjvar’s arm and pulled himself up, stood, head low, finding his balance. He was too pale around the eyes, but he let Ahjvar move his supporting hand to the tree instead, turned loose from that after a few breaths to follow to their prisoner, who had gathered his wits enough to be trying to scrape the ropes loose. Ahjvar put a foot on his chest.

“Wind in the Reeds,” he said. “Any more of you?”

The man just glowered, but his eyes kept sliding to Ghu, bare-chested and bathed in blood. Ahjvar sat down, picking up a broken willow switch. Eyes back to him, following the knife that began peeling off strips of bark. “Be good and answer, or I’ll let him have you.”

Ghu’s lips tightened. He didn’t find that funny.

“Maybe,” the man said. Ahjvar stood the knife in the earth at his side and twisted bark strips, knotted them. Cornel cherry. Truth. Dropped the sign on the man’s chest. He flinched, expecting who knew what. Maybe the knife. Ghu had turned to watch the other way. Nothing moved.

“Others. Anyone at all.”

“No,” the man spat. “Not on this side of the river. Damned devil-deluded barbarian—”

He didn’t hit him, just poked him with his toe.

Ghu turned back, leaning over Ahjvar’s shoulder.

“Your empress,” he said, “is the one devil-led.”

“The Exalted is the chosen daughter of the Old Great Gods.”

“They were alone,” Ahjvar said. “Leave him to me. Go wash your face. Don’t fall in.”

He thought Ghu might warn him off, but he only nodded, faded away, shadow into shadow. Ahjvar could hear nothing of his passage.

“You were sent to join the holy one’s followers, that much is obvious. Where did you come from?”

“Kozing Port.” The man sneered.

“Did I ask where you were born?” He would really want to hurt him if he kept that up. Started weaving another character, a triad, cornel interwoven with blackthorn for strength, walnut for secrets. Laid it, more carefully, over the man’s heart.

“Did you come from the Lai, from Numiya?”

The man licked his lips. “Over the river.”

He did hit him. “Who sent you?”

“Lai Sula. Mulgo Miar.”

“Who? The Pine Lord?”

“Him. Yes.”

“He takes Buri-Nai’s orders?”

Treachery, double treachery. Mulgo Miar had fled to Dan’s service the previous autumn. Mulgo Miar was supposed to be in Alwu, awaiting Lord Ontari’s return. Should be with Dwei Ontari now.

“He obeys the will of the Old Great Gods. The Daughter of the Gods speaks to him in his dreams.”

“So what’s their will? You were sent to do what your captain—tall woman, scars of the pox on her face—failed to do?”

“No.”

“What, then? The holy one,” Ahjvar said, when there was no answer, “won’t have me hurt you, but you’d rather speak the truth anyway, wouldn’t you?”

“Him?”

“Yes.”

Silence. Cold consideration of his options. Unlike the woman Meli, the assassin rejected the temptation to offer himself to them, in any capacity. He abruptly bunched himself and tried to kick. Ahjvar hit him again for that. His face was swelling from the first blow that had sent him down.

“Your empress lies. She lies when she says the Old Great Gods speak to her. She lies when she claims godhead. She’s the tool of a devil, or the master of one. Tell me, are you tattooed for her? Foreign script like thorns, over your heart. Something stole your comrade’s soul as he died, you know. Something takes you all, every one marked with the empress’s tattoo.”

“You lie. And the Old Great Gods are the guardians of our souls. If the Daughter of the Gods needs mine, it’s hers.”

“So you weren’t sent to kill the holy one. What, then?”

The spell still pushed against the man, urging confession.

“To capture him. He’s only a man, not even a wizard. Nothing but a runaway slave to beat to obedience, once we get him away from the wizard. And his Northron guardian, the wizard’s slave. You. You won’t die, she said. A necromancer’s slave. Cut off his hands but don’t think him harmless even then. Bring him bound in chains.”

“I’m not—Northron.” Don’t get sidetracked. “What does she want with us?” No point telling the man he and his partner would have been doomed even if they had succeeded in their abduction, or that their empress—or her master—had likely already written them off for dead. Something knew Yeh-Lin now, even if it hadn’t when these men were sent out.

“The Exalted doesn’t need to explain herself to me. Her wisdom sees what I can’t understand. She does as the Old Great Gods desire.”

“Or the devil ruling her changed his mind. Why?”

A man hearing blasphemy. The rage as he flung himself at Ahjvar despite his bonds was that of a maddened animal. And that was what blind faith gave birth to.

Love, too, Ahjvar supposed. He knocked the man back into the bushes.

“She is no goddess but the puppet of a devil. That’s truth for you. How many more of you? Where?”

Ghu had come back, so soft-footed Ahjvar had not heard him. His hair was wet; his coat, rinsed and inadequately wrung out, was draped over his shoulders, dripping. Had he gone right into the river, with that wound? He was clean, but the bandage was wet. A sure way to fever and festering.

His river, he would say.

And how long had he been standing there? The coat was dripping a puddle.

“Enough,” the man said. “You’ll find out. There’s enough of us. You won’t get past Lai Sula, and they’ll come to find you.”

“Where?” He pushed. “Where are they hiding?” Truth and secrets pressed. The man snarled, screwed his eyes shut. “Don’t need to hide. They’re with Lai Sula and the Pine Lord.”

“How far away is the empress? How great an army?”

“Don’t know.”

“What does Buri-Nai want with me that dead isn’t enough anymore?” Ghu asked.

“How should I know? To send you to a traitor’s death and lay out your guts for the birds to fight over while you still breathe. To burn your Northron abomination, I hope, if it can’t be killed. She’ll know what to do against necromancy. The Exalted is guided by the Old Great Gods. I’m Wind in the Reeds. I serve. To the death, I serve.”

Ahjvar sat back on his heels, spoke Praitannec. “They were sent to take us alive to the empress, you and I. Change of plan from the winter.”

“I heard.”

But he thought Ghu had stopped listening. . . . necromancer’s slave . . . cut off his hands . . . He couldn’t have been to the river and back when that was said, could he? To burn your abomination. That, Ghu had most certainly heard. Ahjvar wished he hadn’t.

Would rather he had not heard it himself.

“He has allies over the river. He’s not Meli, a mind easy to turn aside, thoughts only for himself. And I don’t trust he doesn’t already have allies, or can’t find them, in the camp, despite the compulsion of truth on him.”

Ghu said nothing.

“Ghu?”

“I know. You’re not wrong.”

“Go. Out to the road. I’ll follow.”

“No.” Ghu rested a hand on the man’s chest, over where the tattoo must be, the heart. “Ahj, I said: you don’t kill for me. Not like this.”

“No. Don’t—”

The man’s eyes widened. Breath stuttered. Ceased. Gone. Like a candle pinched out.

No blessing for the road. That it would have been empty, with his soul reft away, was not the point. Ghu never left the dead unblessed.

Ghu flung himself away even as Ahjvar reached after him. He caught him on the wood’s edge and they sat there in the sun, wrapped in a heavy silence.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” Ghu said at last. “Killed him. Not that way.”

“It was fast. What’s the difference, if you’d cut his throat?” But the difference was there and he knew it.

Ghu shook his head.

“You should have left him to me,” Ahjvar said. “I don’t mind.”

“Yes, Ahj. That’s why.” But Ghu didn’t turn to him, just watched the road. Hadn’t looked at him, since then.

Ahjvar put a tentative arm around him. He was relieved when at last Ghu sighed and pressed a cheek to his shoulder. Wet and shivering, now. Ahjvar draped the plaid blanket over him, paced about a bit, loaded the crossbow against—whatever, and settled in to wait for Ivah and the dogs and the camp-marking party to find them.

After a while it occurred to him what Ghu had forgotten. Ghu had his eyes shut, leaning back against a tree. Probably not asleep; he looked round when Ahjvar stood up.

“Rafts.”

“Oh. Good.” Ghu shut his eyes again.

Ahjvar went back to the river, to hang Ghu’s black coat like a scarecrow in the shallows as a flag for the raft-folk. Perhaps it would dry in the sun.