4.

 

“I don’t know why I bothered to break the chains,” Zean had said as he pulled a long coat off one of the men he had killed. Behind him, the lords and barons had gathered around their middle-aged Prince and were plotting their return. “I don’t have a wealthy blood brother any more and they would have turned a nice profit. Even the old ones.”

“But who would have thanked you back home?”

He swung the brown hide coat over his arms. “To think, I would have missed my chance at being exiled for kindness.”

The memory still made Bueralan smile. Around him, Dark were filtering through the lower level of the barracks, passing around drinks and food, pausing only to watch when Aerala grabbed the edge of her hammock and dumped Ruk from it. He had told them about the company of Samuel Orlan, of how the cartographer had made it clear that he would accompany them, and they had taken the news well, accepting the added responsibility it put on them with a grace that he himself felt he did not have. It was a stark contrast to the hours after his rescue, when he had been the only one to find grace in the rescue. He could still remember the whispers, the hushed conversations taking place away from him and Zean, and the look of shock on Jehinar Meih’s face when he said that he would not be returning to Ooila. Surrounded by those few for whom he had become a beacon to return to their privilege, the exiled prince had become leashed, and was now being driven, much like the mule that had led them across the border—though as Zean said, when Meih drew closer to them, the mule would have at least known that it was a beast of burden.

“Don’t miss this opportunity, Baron Le,” Jehinar Meih said, his protective ring half a dozen paces behind him, his face steadfastly turned from Zean. “We have been given a second chance by your man. We can still bring thought and progress to our country.”

The ten days that Bueralan had spent with the fifteen men, stripped of their positions, and their rights, had shown him that their revolution had been one built on the back of self-interest and misogyny. The last was the harshest realization, for he had not thought himself capable of such a motivation; but he had believed that the First Queen had represented a cultural and intellectual stagnation, that her statements against slavery and inequalities of wealth and gender were nothing but lies to calm her populace; he had said that her birth and feminine link to power was a gift from a dead deity. The irony that their revolution had grown out of the very thing they were born with—their rank, privilege, political strength and disrespect for the First Queen—was late in arriving, but nonetheless true.

Yet, when the exiled prince left with his court, he left with his back straight, proud and defiant. For a moment, Bueralan thought he made a mistake, one that lingered until months later when he heard of the prince’s death. His execution was thanks to those who had urged him to return home, who had sold him for the promise that they would not end up like him—a promise the First Queen had kept only in terms of how they died.

By then, Bueralan and Zean were two continents to the east, crossing Leviathan’s Blood as poor sailors until they reached Yeala, where no one knew his name. There, he had begun the path that would eventually lead to Dark—there, he and Zean had sold their swords in three battles and, finally, one war.

It had been a small war, a series of battles in a long chain of animosity between two families who had, in Bueralan’s mind, long forgotten the reason of their feud. The opinion was shared by Serra Milai who, taller and darker than either Zean or Bueralan, had told them that was typical for most of her experiences as a mercenary. “Feuds born from the hate children suckled on,” she said, after she and the mercenary band Sky had been dismissed by Lord Feana. They had won his small war, taken back land that had been lost two generations before. In front of them, Serra rolled a silver coin stamped with the Lord’s balding head across her long, strong fingers. “Their coin all spends the same, but their hate wears on you, sure enough.”

She had a plan to reinvent Sky. It had never been a large unit, never been defined by a single battle or event that would demand huge fees, or result in any of the fictions that had become an important part of success, but it had been loyal and long lived. Now, though, a lot of Serra’s soldiers were retiring, purchasing land that was offered by Feana at a cheap rate to seed his success around him. She hadn’t been surprised: Bueralan, turning introspective as he eased onto one of the chairs in the barracks, suspected that Serra had taken the job so that her aging soldiers would have that opportunity. It had not been for her, however.

She had offered him and Zean (“You and your boy,” she said) a job in the new Sky, a job to be intelligent with, a job to slip in and out, a job to disrupt, to step out of full pitched battles and instead work more subtly.

“It’s still warfare,” she said, when she first brought it up. “Sabotage work. It has some killing, but nothing like you’ve seen over the last month. None of the tent hospitals, none of the witches with pens of small animals to butcher for your healing, none of this glory shit that is becoming so popular. No one will ever need to know who you worked for.”

After she had left, Bueralan turned to Zean and asked him what he thought.

“Someone always knows,” the latter said laconically. They were sitting in a small bar, in a booth at the back. “Which is maybe why this is not the kind of work we should be doing.”

“Not enough renown?”

Zean met his gaze. “I know you like the sound of it, but this work is not so different from what we did for Meih.” He was never the Prince. “Working weak links, plots within plots, pitting your intelligence against someone else’s and seeing who comes out best.”

“You think I like it because I want redemption?”

“Do you?” he asked.

“No.”

“It was a big mistake getting involved with him.”

“It was,” Bueralan admitted. “How’d you feel after the last battle?”

Zean leaned back, shrugged once. “Lucky.”

“We were lucky; we’re not soldiers.”

“We would learn it.”

“Would we?” he said. “You would be happy to dig ditches, clean latrines and stitch yourself up with pig gut until you earn enough rank to pay for a witch?”

“Your privilege is showing.”

Bueralan grinned.

“But yeah,” Zean continued in a drawl, “I’m not fond of the dog work.”

“We’d not last.”

“We won’t,” he agreed, “but you still haven’t answered the question: what happens when the First Queen finds out that we’re essentially revolutionaries for hire?”