70. THE NAME OF THE GAME

Jarith’s story

The imperial army bivouac, just outside Atrine, Jorat

Also that afternoon

The swirl of emotions in Atrine was different from the Capital.

He should have anticipated this problem. The Quuros army was still relocating; they hadn’t spent more than a few hours at this new site. That meant that instead of an entire emotional massacre dumping blood for days into the psychic waters, it was the faintest trickle, easily missed. After all, these people were already facing down the stresses of invasion, of war. They were already dealing with aftershocks of demons and dragons. Of course they were anxious and full of tension. But it wasn’t the right kind of tension.

He followed Tyentso, Fayrin, and Kalindra invisibly through the camp, paying attention to each group of people they passed. Fear and stress and low-boiling anger, excitement and anticipation and grimly defiant determination. Not even close to the same singular rage and loyalty he felt while they were in the Capital, but Jarith didn’t doubt that it would reach that point if they were there for more than a few days.

“You could have warned me that it’s cold here,” Kalindra muttered, rubbing her hands over her arms.

“Ah damn. I forgot, sorry,” Tyentso said. She wasn’t sorry. She was deeply amused and fond, and laughing at herself too. The reasons probably made sense to Tyentso but were less than clear to someone like Jarith.

Kalindra threw her a scathing glare, at which point Fayrin shook his head and ordered one of the nearby soldiers to give Kalindra a sallí cloak. Kalindra took it, mollified.

On at least three separate occasions, Fayrin suggested that Tyentso should take a nap first. Each time, she waved him off. Both of them were starting to lose their tempers about it.

They had almost made the full circuit around the camp when Jarith scented a trace of the emotional storm he’d experienced at the Capital. He tugged on Kalindra’s misha in the direction he wanted them to go.

He paused.

Kihrin was here. He could feel him, a gathering void, hovering at the borders of his awareness. He was hiding himself, and doing a good job at it, but Kihrin’s efforts to restore Jarith’s mind had left the demon sensitive to Kihrin’s presence.

Jarith thought it best not to mention it.

“How about this way?” Kalindra gestured idly.

Tyentso didn’t argue. She headed in that direction.

He tracked the emotions in clusters. A flash of fear here, an appeal to loyalty there. Splashes of blood spreading out drop by drop. Thicker now. Easier to see.

The taint was a slowly widening spiral. At first glance, he had thought it gathered around Tyentso, but the more he examined the situation, the more he realized that she was just the focus of all those emotions. She wasn’t the source.

He led them in a circle, tracing where the emotional signatures were stronger or weaker, until he had isolated it down to a single tent.

**I believe it’s in there,** Jarith told the woman.

“Oh, fuck me,” Tyentso said. “I know whose tent that is.”

“That little bastard,” Fayrin said.

“Let’s see—wait!” Kalindra was too late.

Tyentso had already ducked into the opening and entered.

Tyentso’s story

“Caerowan!” Tyentso shouted.

The Devoran priest looked up from his writing table, set up carefully under no fewer than four mage-lights. He had a stack of letters in front of him—most of which was Tyentso’s own correspondence.

He should have bowed and asked her what she needed. Caerowan had always been excruciatingly polite and correct, even in the face of her volatile temper, which was why he made the perfect secretary. He should have responded to Tyentso coming in off the street shouting for him as though it were a perfectly normal thing that happened all the time.1 And then Tyentso would tell him what she needed, and he’d make it happen, typically with the most immaculately perfect handwriting that she’d ever seen. That should have been his normal response.

He didn’t do that. Caerowan tilted his head and gave her a single, flat-lidded glance, taking in both her appearance and that of Fayrin behind her. She couldn’t have said what tipped him off. Something in one of their expressions, perhaps.

Then he knocked over a small, decorative vase on his desk. It hadn’t even hit the ground before gray smoke began billowing out in a thick, smothering blanket.

At least four knives flew into that smoke. Tyentso couldn’t have said which ones were Kalindra’s and which ones were Fayrin’s. In the back of her mind, she noted that the most infamously louche member of the imperial High Council had decided to stop pretending at incompetence.

At just that moment, an explosion boomed, and the ground under their feet shook. Tyentso had a sudden, wild thought where she wondered if this was Caerowan’s doing, but neither sound nor rolling ground centered on their location. This had happened somewhere else. If Havar had started his invasion early, Tyentso was going to murder the bastard.

Murder him more.

“What the fuck was—” Kalindra started to curse, and Tyentso could hardly blame her.

That second of hesitation cost them dearly. It was all the time Caerowan needed. Magnified by the smoke, a flash of light that Tyentso recognized all too well illuminated all the corners of the tent. She magically swept aside the haze even as Kalindra and Fayrin rushed over to her, but it was too late.

Caerowan had run, opening up and closing a gate so quickly …

Tyentso started tearing up the floor using magic. It took no more than a second of looking to find it: a House D’Aramarin Gatestone, hidden under the rugs.

“We could follow him,” Fayrin said, but he didn’t sound committed to the idea.

And no wonder, really.

Tyentso frowned. “Yeah, that’s not happening. Who the fuck knows what Havar will have waiting on the other side.”

“So you think Caerowan had the Cornerstone?” Kalindra directed that question to her demon husband.

**Yes,** Jarith said. **The taint is fading.**

Tyentso sighed. That wasn’t good news, under the circumstances. It meant that in a short while, however many hours it took, her people would start feeling the effects of being separated from Warmonger.

And her enemy would start exploiting its benefits.

“Fuck me,” Tyentso muttered. Then she raised her voice. “Now would someone find out what the hell that explosion was?”

The answer came from the least welcome source.

Jarith whispered, **It was Kihrin. Something’s gone wrong.**