61

THE CITY STREETS WERE NEARLY EMPTY AS THE BOY, CALLED FIG, ushered us to the center of the Red Cap army’s warehouses, more abandoned storefronts lining Fountain Square. These shops had served, mainly, the upper-class households, including nobles. The storefront Viola had secured for me was nearby. I was sure Alice and Emmi had abandoned it, like all of these shop owners. The Lord of Coin’s offices, where I had spent long hours waiting in line, was now a makeshift field hospital. That, I thought with the closest feeling to a small victory I’d experienced in this battle-scarred city, was a far better use for the place.

“The worst of the fighting happened here,” Fig said as we grew closer to Fountain Square. “The Stone Castle was well garrisoned and put up a fight. Of course we couldn’t just storm the place, it’s too fortified for that. But someone got inside and opened a passageway onto River Street.”

I started—the door onto River Street was a secret known to only a handful of nobles, and Theodor and I had used it in our attempt to forestall the revolt at Midwinter. “Any idea who?” I asked.

“I always figured one of Commander Otni’s best,” Fig said proudly. I glanced at Alba and shook my head—the Red Caps had a silent ally in the nobility. I wondered who, my thoughts skimming Ambrose, though we had not heard a whisper from him. “Anyway, after we surprised them inside the Stone Castle, the fighting moved into the streets, and we drove them out.” I took one last look at the old fortress, its narrow windows and high walls imposing and hung with red banners, their frayed edges dancing in the breeze.

The fountain at the center of the square was nearly destroyed, the carved stone stags and swans broken and charred. The storefronts nearest the fountain were lined with stocks, the crude devices usually used to punish drunks and pickpockets and other petty transgressors put to a new use. I choked as I saw them, and even Alba turned her face away, pale and trembling.

The stocks held dead men and women. Nobles, their silks and fine cottons moldering in the sun and the rain. Coarse versions of their family devices were painted on the walls behind them, with crude epithets painted alongside them. The people themselves… I gagged and forced bile back down my throat. The bodies had been left out for well over a week, and the flesh was decaying, peeling away, bloated in some places and shrunken in others like badly made puppets. I recognized one—Hardinghold. The device, a pair of dancing bears, had been redrawn with bears hung from gibbets. Two corpses were stationed below it, and I couldn’t discern if the woman in torn and stained blue silk was Pauline.

“You set them up like dolls after they were dead? Like wax figures?” I demanded.

Fig ducked his head. “No, they were…” His mouth knotted around the answer, and he started over. “That was the method of execution for anyone found aiding the Royalists.”

“Mercy of the Creator,” murmured Alba. I didn’t have words. I saw another family sigil I recognized—Crestmont. The pair of figures below slumped like thin rag dolls. Crestmont had hung his own noose, I thought bitterly. If he had come with us to the summit instead of staying behind to foment insurrection, he wouldn’t have been killed. But I couldn’t look away from the fine silk embroidery on his stained silk stockings. When he had gotten dressed, that last morning, had he known he was facing execution?

I wanted to cry. This was not my Galitha City, my friends and neighbors. They were not capable of such cruelty. These people had fought against the reforms, broken the law, turned traitor to their own country, and they deserved, I allowed, execution. But not like this. Not torture for the sake of pain, disgrace for the sake of spectacle.

“Why?” I begged.

“Commander Otni says that everyone must join or fall, that there is no room for indecision now. This was…”

“This was a good way to convince anyone still undecided of the virtue of the cause,” Alba supplied. “Mercy on you all.”

Fig ignored her, but I searched for her arm. She gripped my hand. “Commander Otni says this is how war is,” Fig insisted.

“It’s how he’ll fight a war,” I replied, but the bitterness I would have felt toward Niko half a year ago was tempered, knowing what he was facing. An uncertain war and his own, likely ugly, death if the gambit failed. He had few advantages and leveraged them all now. “The nobles you’ve… executed,” I said. “Were all of them actively aiding the Royalists? None of them were killed simply for being of noble houses?”

Fig stuck out his chin. “Of course. Captured and tried fairly.”

The lack of clear methods and the rapidity of the trials didn’t inspire confidence. I didn’t want to ask the next question, but I did. “Prince Theodor’s brother Ambrose was still in the city when we left.”

“So?” Fig kicked a stone.

“I won’t find him in one of those stocks, will I?”

Fig paled. “Not if he was one of us—look, Miss Sophie, Commander Otni can’t help that some people may have gotten a little out of hand. But we didn’t execute anyone in the royal family, all right?” I shuddered at his use of we; a twelve-year-old boy should have had no part in wartime executions. “Commander Otni can’t keep track of every casualty.”

“The lists of the dead are, I am sure, poorly kept in a city at war. Yet even so, those who would grieve wish to keep their vigils,” Alba said.

Fig returned her quiet reprimand with a baffled shrug. “The warehouse,” he said, gesturing toward the cathedral.

“I’m sorry, I’m not from Galitha, but that looks like a place of worship,” Alba said.

“Commander Otni says we need a defensible storehouse more than we need incense and hymns. Says the Galatine Divine can be better served working than praying.”

“So he’s a philosopher now, too,” I muttered. We stepped inside, and I found the well-lit cavern of space inside bustling with activity. A cadre of men picked at old muskets, taking apart the rusted locks, scouring them clean and daubing them with oil. Across from them, a group of elderly men and a few women made lead shot, the heated metal poured into molds and carefully counted by one old woman who seemed to be blind. And toward the front of the cathedral, near altars stripped of embroidered cloths and incense but piled with bolts of linen, women sewed.

Leaning against the altar, a pile of coarse unbleached linen in her lap, was Alice. She stitched a long serviceable seam, tying a messy knot before she noticed me. It was passable work on utilitarian cloth, but nothing like the fine stitching and practiced hand I knew she was capable of. A pile of cut pieces sat beside her—work shirts. A makeshift uniform for a ragtag army.

Before I could speak, Emmi trotted toward the altar from a side aisle, her hands full of spools of thread and a lopsided pincushion. “Sophie!” she cried, dropping the pincushion. It didn’t roll far, settling on its flat side near Alice. Alice looked up, startled, grabbed the pincushion, and then realized that Emmi was looking at me.

“Why are you here?” Emmi called, darting toward me.

“Are you finished with your work?” a dour Pellian woman scolded Emmi, who paused, conflicted, in the aisle.

“Let her be, Mags,” Alice said, carefully setting her work aside as she rose. “That’s Sophie Balstrade.”

Mags, whatever position she may have held in the hierarchies of Niko’s army, did not supersede the authority of myth. Whatever most of these people had thought of me, traitor or hero, a hush swept the cathedral to silence and their work stilled as their attention turned, inescapably, toward me. I felt strangely small and oversize at once, aware of my own awkward movement and yet not nearly great enough to fill the expectations these people held of me. Somewhere, far back in a side aisle, a baby cried.

“Alice,” I said. “Are you all right? And you, Emmi?” With only moments to decide my strategy, I chose to pretend the mythical Sophie didn’t exist and behave as normally as I could. Alba followed at a polite distance, settling herself in the alcove of the cathedral where candles used to wait for penitents to light them in prayer. Now the wall was empty, even the candleholders torn down, used, I presumed, by Niko’s army.

Alice took my hand. “Things fell apart so quickly, I—we—we shut up the shop and just holed up while the worst of the fighting was going on.”

“I couldn’t get home,” Emmi added, “so I stayed with Alice. It’s all right now,” she added in a rush.

“What of everyone else?”

Alice’s lips were pressed into a thin line. “Our old neighborhood is half burned down, and I’m sick thinking of how many likely died in the fire alone, without even considering those shot and bludgeoned and who knows what else.”

“The Pellian quarter has been left alone, mostly—Commander Otni and the nobles didn’t fight there much.” Commander Otni. If Emmi was using a title for Niko, his self-made leadership had stuck. “All our friends there are safe.”

Another thought struck me—if Niko was demanding my help, had he sought out the charm casters in the Pellian quarter? He knew full well that they were there. “Venia and Heda and Lieta and the rest—are they working here, too?” I asked. “Has Niko asked you all to cast for him?”

Emmi stabbed her pincushion with an errant pin. “We’ve made a few tablets for a few of our own friends, but most of the Galatines don’t believe the superstitions. Commander Otni says it’s all right to give anyone a tablet who wants one, but he doesn’t want to force Pellian customs on a Galatine army. I think Venia and Heda are working in the laundry, and Lieta cooks for the hospital.”

That sounded like Niko—he was happy to leverage charms in other ways, I was sure, but savvy enough to recognize that his Galatine soldiers weren’t going to wear clunky clay tablets.

“I’m not sure, but Theodor’s brother may still have been in the city. Ambrose?” I asked.

Emmi shook her head, and Alice shrugged. “I’ve heard nothing of him. I would have assumed Otni would publicize either his loyalty or his execution.”

“Which means he doesn’t know, either. And you? Truth be told, I never thought you a great devotee of the cause. What changed?” I asked Alice.

“You saw what’s out there. There’s common folk and nobles alike. More hung from the walls for aiding the enemy, more killed by mobs.” Alice met my eyes. “You’re with the Red Caps or you might well be a spy, a collaborator—and a target. Otni hasn’t ordered that, but he hasn’t stopped it, either.”

“And you worked for me.” I sighed.

“That wouldn’t have mattered,” Alice lied carefully.

“And more than that, the Red Caps collected all the food in the city that they could. If you want your share, you have to work.” Emmi bit her lip. “It’s the only way to ration it, if the port stays blockaded. We can’t get much in overland, with the Royalist army south of us.”

I exhaled carefully. A city nearly cut off, food in short supply, professional soldiers continuing to harry volunteer fighters—that Niko had managed to hold the city at all was close to a miracle.

“At any rate,” Alice said, picking the shirt back up to sew, “you can avoid trouble all you want but if it’s going to come banging down the door, you may as well put your oar in somewhere you can do some good. Or at least earn your supper.”

“Let me help you,” I said, picking up a threaded needle.

Before I could finish a seam, the air around us seemed to tremble and the foundation creaked under the strain of a distant thunder. “What was—”

“They’re firing mortars over the far wall again,” Emmi said. There was a furrow between her brows that hadn’t been there before.

“We’re out of range here,” Alice added.

I stared at both of them, their focus still on their sewing, as though this were another day in the atelier, the work in their hands yet another silk gown, the disturbance nothing more than the tinker getting in a row with the rag man on the street corner. “It’s been like this the better part of the week,” Emmi explained. “The city’s been cleared of the Royalists, but they still hammer at us with some light artillery fire.”

“Light artillery fire?” I managed to say.

Emmi cracked a smile. “From what I understand. I’m just repeating what the men who go out on patrols say.”

Fig dashed up with urgency flooding his young face. “Commander Otni says you’re to come with him right away,” he said. Alba rose to join us. “The nun can stay here.”

“I cannot come with you, then?”

“Commander Otni—”

“Did not request me. Very well.” She sat next to Emmi. “I will remain in the company of these ladies, then.” She met my eyes—she would learn what she could here. There were few moments that passed that could not, for Sastra-set Alba, be turned to some use.

“Where are we going?” I asked Fig as he tugged my sleeve in haste.

“The wall,” he replied. “Otni says you could be of some use there.”