2.

 

Feeling ill, and pressed against the black bars of his cage in an attempt to stretch out as much as he could, Bueralan watched the Leeran Army as if he had not seen it before.

After the ritual with the white horse, the soldiers who had drunk from it—who had drunk more blood than he believed could be in a beast—had butchered the remains of the animal, mincing it in the remaining blood before putting it into the feed of their animals. The power of the ritual had continued to hang over the long, sprawling camp of the army. The beasts had eaten the meal in eerie silence, watched by their silent owners, their hands stroking their necks, holding the bags for the most part, but at times bringing it to the mouths much like a parent to a child. The camp’s silence kept until the morning, when the buzz of insects announced the return of a sense of normality, but just the sense of it. The morning’s sun rose and a strangeness—connected, he knew, with the blood magic he had been witness to—gripped Bueralan as he gazed at the soldiers around him, seeing the discipline that was at their core, but now with a darker edge. He watched dogs vomit blood only to lick it up, horses shift awkwardly, pigs lie panting, and soldiers offer food and items to each other without words, their understanding and knowledge of each other an intangible part of their world, reaching such an extent that he watched a young man and woman begin to file each other’s teeth, a damaged courtship ritual. He’d been left to his own devices once the ritual had begun, Dural had left him, and since then it had been as if he did not exist. Even his greasy, bloodstained plate remained on the wooden slats of the wagon.

It was that plate that moved first when the cart lurched, lodging itself in one of Waalstan’s blank books.

Bueralan was not a man who avoided blood magic philosophically, though he had no talent for it himself. The witches of his homeland promised much when a mother came to them with a new pregnancy, and though he had little time for the politics of rebirth, the women who held tiny bottles of kept souls were not without power. At a young age he had broken his arm—he had, like most children, been adventurous when he should not have been—and his mother had taken him to a witch who had cut open her thumb and, after smearing blood across his arm, mended the bone in one of the most painful moments of his young life. It was not until he was older that he realized his mother had allowed the pain to be caused deliberately, to instill in him a sense of personal self-preservation.

Yet, he had never seen blood magic on the scale that he had seen it the night before. He had never seen it so raw, as if it were a child’s fist, smashing across an arrangement of toys. If he had been able to step outside his cage, to follow Dural to the white horse, Bueralan knew that he would have. The knowledge that he would have drunk the horse’s blood appalled him, yet, he did not believe that General Waalstan was the originator of the power. It would be easy to fall back upon the assertion that the unknown man was a warlock, that he held the Leeran Army—and indeed, the Leeran nation—in his thrall, but Bueralan believed that the man had no more power other than the one he exerted from rank. Waalstan was as much a victim of last night’s magic as he was, though admittedly a much more willing one. As Bueralan’s stomach began to rebel beneath the hot day and rough journey, he remembered how he had seen Waalstan rise at first light, his body coated in a thin sheen of sweat; for a moment, Bueralan had thought he was confused by what he saw before him, that as he stood before thousands of men and women, he did not recognize a single one of them, nor the land he stood upon, and the direction he was marching. It did not last long, for the hunch of Waalstan’s shoulders had straightened as he took a second and third step, and the ease he held himself returned, but Bueralan thought he had glimpsed an important revelation in regards to the general.

It was the She of Waalstan’s speech that Bueralan returned to as the cart made its rough way across the ground, drawing closer to the Spine of Ger, his body uncomfortable against the warming bars, the meal from the night before sitting worse and worse in his stomach. Pushing it aside, he focused on the nameless figure who was the cause of such inspiration, who had sent the white horses to be slaughtered. She could be a witch, perhaps, or one of the men and women who had woken to find that what had been contained within the bodies of the gods had found its way into her own. Both would be rare, but neither would be unheard of, especially the latter. No “cursed” figure intent on violence and conquest had emerged in Bueralan’s lifetime, but he had grown up in Ooila, where the Five Queens modeled their power after the Five Kingdoms, after the men and women who had conquered much of this part of the world, believing they were gods.

Before him, the cart hit a ditch. His stomach heaved and he reached for the bars on either side of him, hearing a voice as he did.

“I am afraid, mother.”

A man’s voice, but a voice he did not recognize, a voice that did not come from around him. The cart pulled itself slowly out of the ditch, rocking his cage as it did.

“You have no need to be afraid.” It was a woman’s voice, strong and confident. “We are not people who fear death, for whom the unknown is but darkness. We are watched and cared for, soldier. We are known and held. We are loved, like no other human has been loved. You must never forget this as you approach battle. You must wear it proudly. You must wear it without doubt.”

There was no reply and, in an attempt to still his protesting stomach, Bueralan lowered his head between his knees and breathed deeply and slowly.