Field Command
The Road to Orstead, Old Sarresant
The hills had been transformed and, from the look of it, were about to be again. Tents and horse-lines had been put up in all directions, with just as many being taken down, carts of stores and foodstuffs moving as quick as they could be loaded, one after another.
“She’s sending you out again, isn’t she?” Remarin asked. He wore one of their uniforms, as strange a sight as Tigai had ever expected to see. Blue cap atop his short-cropped hair, though his beard still marked him as Ujibari, thick and tied with cord in a style unlike he’d seen on any Sarresanter. He carried one of their long rifles, and that much was familiar; even with all the advantages of their superior technology, he’d wager on Remarin over any five of their best marksmen, and if their flint-caps and powder bags let him fire in the rain, so much the better for them all.
“Which one?” he asked, joining Remarin in moving out of the way of a wagon and its team. “Empress d’Arrent, or Mei?”
Remarin grinned. “Does it matter?”
“D’Arrent has me set to ride again this afternoon. Making for the eastern line two days hence.”
“A hard pace,” Remarin said. “I’m with Dao’s brigade. The Nineteenth. We’ll follow in your wake, a few days behind, I’m sure.”
“Acherre bloody rode me raw for a week, and now we do it again. They didn’t even stay long enough for the anchor to take hold. I could as well have not bothered. It’ll be gone within a day, unless I go back to secure it.”
Remarin gave him a wistful smile. “Just as well you came back. Dao is busy, but he’ll be relieved to see you.”
They halted for another train of supplies and men, shouting in their strange, throaty tongue.
“Remarin … I … I’m not sure Mei made the right choice, allying us with d’Arrent.”
Remarin raised an eyebrow, and for once, it was a blessing that none around them understood the Jun tongue.
“I saw the battlefield,” he continued. “A terrible rout. The enemy’s kaas-mages are a terrible weapon. We saw their power firsthand, at Kye-Min. I want us to have a new start, but if this army is going to lose …”
“Talk to Mei,” Remarin said.
“I have already. She wouldn’t listen. Said she’s afraid we’ll be branded turncoats if we switch sides so soon after coming here.”
“A wise stance, it seems to me,” Remarin said. “Trust her, Tigai. We all have our gifts, and your sister-by-marriage is adept at these sorts of affairs. She’ll suss out the realities of what’s to come, and I needn’t remind you there are spoils to be had, even for the losers, in war.”
“What if there was another way …” he began, but Remarin clicked his teeth, cutting him short.
“Your magi tale again,” Remarin said. “Mei won’t hear of it, after our time with the Herons. We’re done with their games.”
“But there’s one of them here,” he said.
“There’s one of them everywhere,” Remarin said. “That they wield no power openly in this Empire is enough for me.”
He fell quiet. It had gone the same, with Mei. He hadn’t yet brought himself to mention the shadow-creature after Voren had stabbed him, or the old man’s offer of strength and security for his family. The strangeness of it had weighed on him since the first night on the road.
Remarin clapped his shoulder. “Go,” he said. “See your brother. He’s in his element here, never mind these soldiers’ lack of speaking proper tongues. I’ll credit this Empress d’Arrent: She knows talent when she sees it. That’s rare enough, among any nobility.”
“I have to report to the Empress first,” he said. “She sent a courier to fetch me in my tent at daybreak.”
“Then she’ll be expecting you long since,” Remarin said. “And I’ll leave you alone to your tongue lashing for it.”
He watched Remarin trot ahead, vanishing into a sea of blue coats as the camp stirred itself to move. He’d expected exactly that sort of reaction. His family had never trusted magi—in spite of his nature, they’d managed to make him feel like one of them, but it hadn’t erased the truth of what he was. They’d certainly used his gifts easily enough. Perhaps this was the same sort of thing. Perhaps he should consider the old man’s offer on his own, if Mei wouldn’t hear him out.
He pivoted, making his way toward the central tents. Remarin was probably right that he should have gone there first thing, but he’d been dreading the kind of use he was sure d’Arrent intended for him.
A week of some of the hardest travel he’d ever endured, and he’d as good as gotten nothing for it. He’d tried to tell Acherre and d’Arrent it took time for an anchor to settle, that he needed to stay there for a day or two in order for a strand to form between him and the place to the south, but in the moment all that had mattered was moving Marquand and his company to and from the battlefield. He blinked to shift his sight to the starfield as he walked, and sure enough the light he’d set was there, dim and fading fast, in the mountains far to the south. If d’Arrent had just let him stay, the week wouldn’t have been wasted. All he would have needed was—
He almost stumbled into the way of a passing horseman, earning a shouted curse and a horse’s whinny as the rider tugged the reins.
He steadied himself and blinked again. Something was there, among the stars. On this side of the Divide the field was black, almost lifeless, save for a tiny handful of lights scattered across all its continents. He’d come to recognize them all, but a new one had appeared, blazing with a sun’s intensity, far to the west.
He could have counted on two sets of hands every star in the field on this side of the Divide. This was new, and near the one they’d used to put themselves close to New Sarresant. It might even be in New Sarresant itself, saving him the two weeks’ journey from the site in the northwest.
Sarine.
It had to be her. This was what the old man among the stars had wanted him to watch for. A star five times the size of any other, as though she’d punched a fist through the fabric of the starfield itself.
D’Arrent was waiting for him, and his instinct was to consult Mei and Dao for what to do. But no—they wanted nothing to do with the old man’s offer. And for all its intensity, there was nothing promising that the star would linger if he didn’t have a strand tied to it himself.
He closed his eyes, tethering himself around its light. At worst he could come back, and if it cost him a day of recovery, well, he’d earned as much, whatever d’Arrent wanted to believe he could handle.
He shifted.
Darkness swallowed him, but it was only ordinary nightfall, having traveled westward against the path of the sun. He stood in a stone building lined with rows of wood benches, facing a dais backed by massive stained-glass windows, lit by a single hooded lantern on the wall. The shuffle of his steps echoed through the chamber, under a vaulted ceiling thirty armspans above his head.
“Êtes-vous perdu, mon fils?”
He spun to find a mustached man in a brown robe hovering in an alcove behind him, holding a broom as though he’d been sweeping in the middle of the night.
“I followed a star here,” he said, realizing belatedly the man wasn’t going to understand a word of the Jun tongue. “Sarine,” he tried instead. “I’m looking for Sarine.”
The man knew the name. He saw it in the suddenly stiff shoulders, the way the man’s grip on his broom suddenly transformed it halfway to a quarterstaff.
“Qu’est-ce que vous voulez avec elle?”
Tigai shook his head. Damned if he hadn’t spent weeks around the Sarresant tongue and not bothered to learn a word.
“Tigai?”
He turned around again, this time looking up toward a loft built below the panes of stained glass. The silhouette of a figure stood there, at the edge of a wood railing.
“Sarine,” he called back. The man in brown said something further in the Sarresant tongue, and she replied, in her strange manner of speaking every tongue at once.
“Yes, I know him, Uncle, though I have no idea what he’s doing here.”
“It’s … complicated,” he said. “And where did you go? We were traveling together and you bloody vanished with Yuli and Lin.”
She stepped back from the railing, sliding down the ladder leading up to her loft.
“That’s complicated, too,” she said when she landed on the stone floor. “But it’s good to see you.”
He returned the warmth in her expression, though it masked the feeling that he’d been a fool to come here. What was he supposed to do, wait until she turned her back and then knife her? Stay close, the old man had said, and keep her trust. Seeing her here in person colored it all in gray.
“My uncle was telling me about Erris d’Arrent,” she said. “Empress now? And that she took the army across the sea. Were you with her? And your family?”
“Yes,” he said. “She had me setting anchors to move her magi—her binders—to the fronts. A bloody mess, between kaas-mages, officers with golden light for eyes, more bloody magi than you’d ever want to see in one place.”
“Wait—kaas-mages? And golden light?”
“That’s what Marquand called them. And yes, golden light—I saw it with Acherre, and again among the enemy’s ranks on the front lines … look, you should come back with me. D’Arrent’s on the shit end of the battle that’s coming. She could use you. And … whatever it is you can do, scattering soldiers like flies. I guess that makes you a kaas-mage, too?”
“Yes,” Sarine said. “Partly. That’s what Anati is. But the golden light—you’re sure you saw it among her enemies?”
He nodded. “I saw it firsthand. Why? Isn’t that something d’Arrent can do?”
“It is. But if you saw it among her enemies … Lin put a glass knife in Paendurion’s back, at the Gods’ Seat. It must mean he survived.”
“Paendurion. Empress d’Arrent’s enemy? And Lin, is she—?”
“Lin is dead,” Sarine said. “At least I think she is. But Paendurion … you said the Sarresant armies were losing?”
Lin was dead. The words hit him harder than he’d thought they would, after all the pain she’d caused him, and his family. Strange.
“Yes,” he said. “At least, that’s what I saw, along the southern lines. D’Arrent has her soldiers marching east now. And like I said, she could use you.”
Sarine wore a resolute look, turning toward her uncle, who’d come to rest nearby, leaning against his broom.
“I’m sorry, Uncle,” Sarine said. “I have to leave again.”
Her uncle said something in the Sarresant tongue, and Tigai turned aside as she wrapped her arms around him, exchanging words he knew weren’t meant for him. The whole thing seemed too big: layers upon layers of magi, plots and politics and games. Shame stung him, at the thought he might betray Sarine’s trust, but he couldn’t outright dismiss it as an option. Whatever the old man in the starfield had wanted with her, it was hard to deny she wielded power beyond anything he’d seen before they’d met. For now it was enough to stay close. The rest could be decided later.
“Are you ready?” she asked him after she and her uncle had separated.
“I’ll need a few hours, before I use the strands again,” he said. “I traveled halfway across the world, coming here.”
“I can take us,” she said. “Which light is it? Or, I think you have a tether to one of them. Would that be the right one?”
Wind spirits but that was unnerving. He wanted nothing more than to distance himself from magi, and ended up arm-in-arm with the most powerful woman he’d ever seen or heard of, on either side of the Divide.
“Yes,” he said. “And if you’re ready, I’m bloody ready, too.”