1.

 

Dark returned on a mule-drawn cart before the moon had risen fully.

“Well,” Bueralan said, stepping out of the barracks at the sound of the wheel’s clatter on the paved stones. “This takes me back.”

“We’re not in trouble,” Zean said. “You can see we’re not chained.”

“If you were, you would be delivered on a tumbril to a gibbet. That’s the way of Lady Wagan’s empire.”

With a shrug, Zean stepped off the back of the cart lightly, the rest of Dark following. For the first time, Bueralan thought, they looked as if they weren’t carrying the weight of Elar’s death, of the final weeks of the work in Ille. For the first time since leaving that small kingdom, the hardness that had begun to settle into the faces, the borderline cruelty that had come upon them, as if an invisible barrier had been breached, had begun to fade. He could see the relaxed stride of Kae as he dropped off the wagon, the casual way Ruk looked around the square they stood in, and the fact that Liaya had left her satchel in the barracks. Approaching the driver, Zean said, “Have you ever noticed how prosaic the memories of your exile are?”

“Only through hard work,” Bueralan replied.

Liaya stopped in front of him. “I think the real problem,” she said in mock seriousness, “is that you weren’t exiled for very interesting reasons.”

“There are no interesting reasons,” he said. “You know that as well as I do.”

“It is not all about mules, either.”

As the cart began to turn across the stones before him and the others entered the barracks, Bueralan recalled the nine-day march he had made with fifteen other men, linked together not just by chains that threaded heavily around their feet, but by their failure and disgrace as well. Slouched beneath the weight of that realization, the soon to be exiled Baron of Kein trailed at the back of a line organized by rank, with only two behind him: young men who had not been able to lay claim to land or title yet. Ahead of him, the barons and lords who had been his betters made a long, aging line that began with the fifty-two-year-old prince, Jehinar Meih. Tall and narrow, he looked as if he were made from dried wood that threatened to split in the summer.

At night, they all sank to the ground and ate the small amount of bread offered, drank the warm water from the pitcher shared between them and listened to the middle-aged prince talk of his plans, of his—of their—return. Bueralan had stopped listening on the second night. He had heard enough, and in the cooling dark when his blistered feet rested against the ground he had no time for the bitter words Jehinar Meih spoke.

We all stood on that canal wall, Bueralan thought, and we listened to a general tell us how many people would die, how slim our chances were of survival, how we were like the butterflies he saw rise every morning just to die, and you—we—

We lost our nerve.

There was no other word for it.

His mother had taught him when he was young that the high end of politics did not reward those who hesitated. Her words followed him, on the nine nights he lay on the hard ground. By then she had been dead for five years, having died in political isolation after his father’s poisoning in the Queen’s court when he was five. His mother’s political exile was said, by his uncles and aunts, to have revealed a bond deeper and more intimate than any had ever suspected of them. His memories of her—frail and withered in her large bed—had become sharper and more pronounced each night, as if only now, in failure, could he recognize her wisdom.

In this regard, he was alone.

Bueralan only had to look at the guards around them to know how futile it was to plot and plan a return. Wearing the golden-edged cloak and golden-edged armor of the First Queen’s Guard, the ten soldiers regarded them with flat gazes and openly laughed at their chained captives when they caught part of their conversations. Captain Pueral, who led the way on her tall gray, was the only one who did not talk. A large, middle-aged career soldier, her casual indifference served only to highlight to Bueralan just how far from relevance they had all fallen.

And then, in the cold morning of the tenth day, they were led out to the slave trader.

He was a small man huddled in furs before a fire, neither remarkable in relation to his trade of flesh, nor his appearance, which was of a common quality. The four men who shared his camp with him were similar in their appearance as mercenaries, and none rose as the First Queen’s Guard crossed the invisible line of nations; instead, they watched as the fifteen men were unhooked from the mule-drawn cart that had set their pace and lined in front of the slaver who rose, rubbing his arms for warmth to inspect each one casually before turning to Pueral in low conversation.

“What is this?” Jehinar Meih demanded. “Captain, you were there when our sentences were read out. We are to be released here, under our own volition, to do this is—”

“Treason,” Pueral finished. “Have you heard of irony, Meih?”

The now exiled prince did not respond.

“The First Queen is the study of a woman who takes deep joy in irony.” She turned her horse around, facing the border and the men in chains. “Often, I find her indulgence of it a fault. The playwrights she employs are a bore. The philosophers unwilling to answer simply and forthrightly. And the children—I will not speak of her flesh and blood, except to say that at times it can be a difficult thing to watch within the palaces. But here today, I do believe I can appreciate what the First Queen sees in irony.”

She laughed—her first laugh in nine days, loud and good natured—as the chain erupted in complaints. Pueral responded and motioned to the men and women around her and returned across the border, not pausing even when the cruel sound of the whip rang out across the exiled prince’s smooth back.

None were spared the whip, and Bueralan would bear the scars of the slaver’s demonstration of power for the rest of his life. The small man told them that they would be marched down to the ocean and sold to a galley, the threat real enough by then that the exiled lords and barons promised the trader riches for another outcome. The small man shook his head and chuckled from deep within his furs. Quietly—almost as if he were sympathetic—he said, “You have nothing, gentlemen. Nothing. You’d best understand that soon or you’ll not survive the year.”

As the afternoon’s sun began to sink, Bueralan had begun to appreciate the full extent of the slave trader’s words. The small man set a quicker pace than the First Queen’s Guard and, exhausted as he sank down to the hard ground, Bueralan listened to the others discuss their fate with an outrage that came from privilege and fear. The latter came from the knowledge that men sold to a galley left their chains only when they died or when their ship was torn apart, breaking the bolts that held them into place. The last often resulted in death, for the heavy weight would drag them down through the black water of Leviathan’s Blood.

He fell asleep with the first real sense of despair he had felt, and awoke hours later to the chain’s weight being pulled off his raw ankle.

At first, Bueralan did not know how to react, sure that what was happening was the herald of something worse, of a new trouble, a new violation he was in. But as he turned his gaze upon the camp, he felt his apprehension fall away. For the first time in months he sensed the lifting of a weight he had just become conscious of: all four guards lay on the ground in a neat line, with the slave trader at the head, still in his fur jacket. The morning’s sun was enough to reveal the cut across his throat, the facial wounds that all had received.

A hand was extended in front of him.

“When I heard you were going to be on a galley,” a voice said, “I almost considered waiting a month.”

“That’s just like you, Zean.” Bueralan took the hand, rose. “To make this about my weight.”

Across from him, the other man’s grip was strong and warm, and he bore the weight of the man he had freed as Bueralan’s blistered feet resisted his rise.