Before Heast gave the order to ride to Ranan, before Refuge and the Brotherhood left the ash-stained air of Celp, he returned to the camp for one more night.
Heast kept the copy of The Eternal Kingdom in his saddlebag and did not remove it until the afternoon’s sun began to rise. Before that, he spent his time talking to Essa and his soldiers and watching Lehana’s reaction. At least half of the Ooilan soldiers who had served the First Queen would have fought in the war between Ooila and Qaaina. He was unsurprised, then, when the first meeting he held between Essa and Lehana turned out to be tense. Lehana stood silent and still beside Heast while Essa explained what had happened in Leera – Aela Ren’s duel with Xrie, the Mountain of Ger breaking, and Bueralan Le’s words – and throughout, the Captain of the Brotherhood kept looking at the Ooilan soldier, as if expecting her to attack him.
After Essa had finished, silence fell between the three of them. They stood behind the wagon where Dural had been laid, near where Heast and Taaira had buried him. ‘Is there going to be a problem between you two?’ he asked, after a moment.
‘Qaaina was a long time ago.’ The scarred mercenary shrugged. ‘It isn’t returning. I have no problems letting it go.’
‘The Brotherhood might be a problem for some of us,’ Lehana admitted. ‘We lost friends on those fields. We lost them fighting Sergeant Essa’s division, in truth.’
‘I’m a captain now.’ He gazed at her. ‘I don’t remember you.’
‘Armour makes it hard to distinguish sometimes.’
‘Aye, but even if I did, I’ve been on the road too long to hold that grudge.’ He glanced at Heast. ‘I have no problem with your people. I followed the smoke to find you. I know what they’re capable of. Me and mine will ride into Ranan beside Refuge without a problem. As for the rest?’ He shrugged again and met Lehana’s gaze. ‘Our road is long and paved with small coins. All that holds it together is blood. My boys and girls are all we got of each other. Qaaina stopped mattering in that equation a long time ago.’
After he had left, Heast said, ‘You’ll fight beside worse in this life. You’ll see some of it in Ranan. The Faaishan Army will not hold a line with you. The Saan will offer you nothing in battle. Indeed, they are just as likely to try and kill you afterwards. But you can trust in Kal Essa. Outside the people you lie and die with, that’s a rare thing.’
Lehana nodded, but her face was impassive. ‘I will tell the others that, sir.’ She saluted him sharply before she left.
She would learn, he thought. Not soon, but in a few years’ time, she would answer as Essa did. It would be after Ranan. After she and the other Ooilan soldiers had stood on muddy fields in Illate, after they stood beside men and women who hated them for generations of slavery, but who needed them now. But it would only happen if they survived the upcoming battle in Ranan, where immortals and gods waited beside the swords and arrows of the Faithful. Heast could still hear Ren’s words, could still see him pick up Waalstan and walk out of Celp, unafraid of the soldiers who stood around him. It might be that Lieutenant Lehana would never have a chance to learn the lesson of separating a life of coin from state, Heast admitted privately to himself.
‘Is it an interesting book, Captain?’ Anemone asked, after the suns had risen and set, after the camp had fallen into a light slumber without incident. ‘You’ve been reading it since you returned.’
Heast turned The Eternal Kingdom over in his hands. ‘I thought it might offer some insights into the battle before us.’
The witch sat next to him on the log, the dark of the Faaishan forest before them, the rustle of the camp behind them. ‘But it did not?’
‘Not so far,’ he admitted. ‘It is a strange book, really. I am no scholar by any means, but it is an incomplete book, I think. It talks about a paradise you and I will go to when we die, where we will not want for anything, where we will not know fear and only know love and bliss. For that, however, we must pledge our allegiance to our new god. We must do it to such an extent that we watch our neighbours and convert them and then speak against them if they do not serve. We must not be afraid to lift the sword against them, it says at one point. It goes on like that, but then, every twenty or so pages, there will be a story about the old gods, and how they loved—’ Heast stopped himself before he said Se’Saera’s name. ‘—their child,’ he said. ‘On those pages, it argues that we should honour all the ways of life the old gods promoted, for they live in the new god. Those pages read very much like fragments. It returns to servitude quickly enough.’
‘Why does the idea bother you? Our lives are ones of servitude.’ Anemone tapped her wrist, where the hint of a tattoo showed. ‘I am in the service of my grandmother and those who came before her. We are both in the service of those who pay us.’
‘Both of us made those choices.’
‘Are we not being offered one?’
‘To believe or die is not a choice.’ Heast laid the book to one side and stretched out his heavy leg. ‘She speaks of one other thing, however.’
‘Must I read it myself?’ Anemone asked. ‘Or will you tell me?’
‘It is the promise of renewal, of rebirth.’ He indicated the book. ‘She promises paradise to those who are Faithful, but it is what she claims she will do to our world once she is complete that fascinates me. She promises to mend what the old gods did. To give us a sun that is whole, to clean the ocean of its poison, to bring back food sources and animals we have lost. She promises to make us stronger and give us longer lives.’
‘It is an attractive promise.’
‘It is, until you start to pull it apart, to see why a man like Faet Cohn, for example, would be part of it.’
‘Oh?’
‘A man whose family history is in slavery is a man who sees himself as someone better than another. He believes there are those human and those not,’ Heast said. ‘If I could, I would have many things returned to us. I would see the species we have lost brought back to life, for example. It is a terrible thing to think that a living creature has stopped existing. For myself, I do not know that one sun or three is preferable, but I would see the ocean free of poison, and the Mad Coast rendered safe. But if those are only achieved by going back to a way of life we have left, then I am not supportive of it. We must go forwards.’
‘And so we will go forwards?’ Anemone reached over his leg for The Eternal Kingdom. ‘To Ranan?’
He was surprised by the question in her voice. ‘You would rather not?’
‘What we saw in Celp bothers me. My grandmother tells me I should simply accept what I saw. I will see its like again, she assures me.’ With the book in her hand, she met Heast’s gaze, and he saw not Anemone, not the witch of Refuge, but rather the young woman he had met months ago, the woman who had not long ago been a child, and who had not left her town unless it was in the safe presence of her grandmother. ‘But I see men and women in my dreams. They are burning. They are the people I know. They are you and Kye and the rest of Refuge. I want to make them stop, but I do not know how to.’
‘Time stops them. Nothing else.’ He did not reach out to her. ‘I will not make you ride to Ranan with us, not if you do not wish. You can return home and forget all this.’
‘I do not have a home outside Refuge.’
‘I can find you one,’ he said gently. ‘If it is what you want.’
Later, after the morning’s sun broke through the treelines and after Heast gave the order to break camp, Anemone rode out beside the Captain of Refuge towards Ranan.