It was pretty clear that Cordelia had not been on a day-long ride in years, but to her honour even as she became pained she did not let out so much as a single complaint. Masego filled in the gap in whining, having always despised horse riding with a vengeance and not grown to like it in the slightest over the years, but of all people Akua came to the rescue.
“My own body is not yet fully accustomed to riding,” she told him. “As I’ve only had it for a few months.”
“It is very nice,” Masego told her, looking her up and down shamelessly.
There’d been about as much sexual tension in that look as in a visit to a healer’s tent to get your boils treated, not that it stopped Cordelia’s eyes from slightly widening. I sighed.
“He’s talking about the homunculus nature of the body,” I whispered at her.
It was made with magic, which made probably would make this the first pair of tits he’d actually be interested in looking at. In all fairness, if you had to pick one pair in all of Creation you could do much worse than Akua Sahelian.
“How sweet of you,” Akua replied, not batting an eye. “But it still needs breaking in, which is why I have been using a spell to ease my time in the saddle.”
Huh. Hadn’t known that. Hadn’t felt it either, but that was not entirely a surprise: a mage of Akua’s calibre was capable of hiding smaller workings from my senses if they did it on purpose. She offered to teach him the spell and he eagerly agreed, then took pity on Cordelia and offered to cast it for her as well.
“So that you might gauge the difference,” Akua smiling offered.
I saw the Prince of Rhenia seriously consider refusing her out of principle, but saddle-sore was saddle-sore. The spell was applied and we quickened our pace again, riding north through the Twilight Ways. It was hard to tell how good a time we were making: from a distance, the starlit compass was vaguer. I could only tell we were progressing, not at what rate. Not yet anyway.
Though the company we’d assembled was unusual – ‘the Black Queen, the First Prince, the Hierophant and the Doom of Liesse walk into a bar’, there was a premise – the travelling itself was smooth. I sometimes took Zombie on flights ahead, as much to bag some game as to cure her restlessness, and the addition of quail and rabbit to the cookpot was welcome. It was our custom to rotate the chore, which led to occasional bouts of the surreal. Sending the former First Prince of Procer out to gather firewood while the Doom of Liesse made biryani chicken for four felt like some sort of deranged waking dream.
Masego seemed entirely nonplussed, not that I’d expected anything else. I doubted Zeze would bat an eye even if the entire Choir of Judgment made him morning eggs, so long as they weren’t over-salted.
Three days in, as Akua went to gather firewood and Masego went about skinning the pair of rabbits I’d caught with a disturbing amount of skill – much easier than people, he’d told me with a horrifyingly well-meaning smile when I’d commented on it – I found my eyes following Cordelia’s hand. Or, more specifically, the ivory baton they were holding. The command rod for the ealamal. I knew it was real. I’d asked Masego, and there was no fake anyone in her service would have been able to make that’d fool his eye.
“You stare at it whenever it is near my hand,” Cordelia said.
“And that surprises you?” I replied. “It’s a lot of power bound to a pretty small object.”
She settled herself more comfortably against the fallen log, adjusting so it wouldn’t dig into her back.
“Not so much more than you could bring to bear, given time to prepare,” she said.
I snorted.
“Yeah, no,” I told her. “That’s not comparable, Hasenbach. Maybe with the Crows personally guiding my hand I could bring down something vaguely in the same league, but it’d kill me for sure.”
“You veiled the sun itself in Iserre,” Cordelia skeptically replied.
“I mimicked the effect of an eclipse, temporarily, for a small part of Iserre,” I corrected. “And that wasn’t me waving around a staff, it took months of preparations and an artefact that a once-in-a-century mage made.”
I paused.
“And I didn’t even do the deed,” I noted. “I’m the one who put in the power over the months, sure, but it was Akua and Sve Noc who called down the fake eclipse.”
“If you believe that to be reassuring,” Cordelia mildly replied, “you are sadly mistaken.”
I rolled my eye at her, then put up my palms in a gesture of appeasement.
“Look, at the end of the day we can quibble about precedents and equivalents all we want but you’re holding in your hands the control rod to one of the few artefacts in existence that can just kill me,” I said. “No ifs or maybes – I’m in the range of the ealamal when you use that thing, and I’m dead.”
I snapped my fingers.
“Just like that,” I said.
I wasn’t sure what the boundary conditions for not being killed by the wave of Light even though there’d been tests – it looked like maybe the standards on Judgment deciding to kill you were as low as they could get, but that was just informed guesswork by Roland – yet the odds that I wouldn’t be one of those picked off were so low as to be nonexistent: Warden or not, I was still a villain. In some ways I felt like I was a girl again, walking around with the knowledge that my life was only my own so long as no one decided to snatch it.
It’d not missed the feeling, but the years of war against Keter had done wonders for my tolerance to looming doom.
“So you’ll have to forgive me the staring,” I bluntly said. “It’s not going anywhere.”
Blue eyes studied me, maybe assessing how much of the agitation in my tone had been genuine. She decided it had been.
“I meant no offence either,” Cordelia said.
I shrugged, having taken none. I’d certainly encouraged the perception of my being an unstoppable force over the years, it very much had its uses. But it had led to people overestimating what I could actually do – or survive – sometimes.
“I’ll confess to some curiosity as to how you even have it,” I said, trailing off.
I wasn’t going to push if I hit a wall, but I was more than a little interested. I didn’t know Rozala Malanza all that well, but she didn’t seem like the kind of woman who just handed out doomsday weapons to recent political opponents.
“It was part of the negotiated terms for my abdication,” Cordelia admitted.
Huh. It was true that Cordelia had been in a decent bargaining position when she’d negotiated her abdication. Support for Hanno had been growing, but it’d not been support for him to rule all of Procer and it certainly hadn’t been support for Rozala Malanza to do the same instead. After the war would have been a toss-up, there was no telling whether Cordelia would have ended up an untouchable saviour or the woman blamed for the horrors, but at the time of the deal her throne had been solid. She’d lost most of Procer, sure but the parts that had stayed were still largely behind her.
“Didn’t quite trust her with the doomsday weapon, huh,” I said.
Couldn’t entirely blame her. If I’d built something that stupidly dangerous I would want to keep it under my thumb too.
“Trust,” Cordelia replied, “can be a very complicated word.”
“I’m not casting stones,” I shrugged. “If anything I can sympathize.”
Cool blue eyes studied me.
“Can you?” she said.
“I’ve had issues with giving up power even when it was my decision to,” I frankly said. “I like to think of those times as growing pains, but it’s not quite that clear-cut.”
I’d been an ass to Vivienne for some time, when it’d sunk in what my abdication would actually mean. An abdication she’d in no way forced on me, any more than my choice of her as my successor. It wasn’t the same with Hasenbach and Rozala Malanza, but there was enough in common I could feel pangs of sympathy.
“Have you considered,” Cordelia said, “that perhaps the decision was as much about you as Princess Rozala?”
I blinked at her, taken aback.
“How’s that?” I asked.
Her lips quirked mirthlessly.
“You have a history of only listening when the interlocutor also has a knife at your throat, Catherine,” Cordelia Hasenbach said. “I took the precaution when I believed I was to be Warden of the West, but I stand by it.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, trying to decide whether I should be insulted by that or not. Wasn’t sure yet.
“A complicated word, is it?” I mildly said.
“I took oaths,” Cordelia simply said. “To you, I do not deny it, but I yet heed older ones. If we lose, if the Dead King triumphs and the land teeters on the brink of extinction, I will make the hard choice.”
My jaw tightened.
“If we lost in Keter,” I slowly said, “you want to blast the ealamal. As strong as you can.”
“More than nine in ten should survive the Light,” Cordelia quietly said. “Should nothing go wrong.”
“You don’t know that it won’t,” I flatly said. “You’ve never fired that thing at the kind of strength you’re talking about. The furthest you’ve gone is the borders of Salia.”
“I cannot,” Cordelia grimly agreed. “Yet what can I do but make that choice anyhow, if the other choice is death for all? Even should nine in ten die instead, it would be better than annihilation.”
“And if it goes worse than that,” I pressed. “If everyone dies?”
Her lips thinned.
“Then when a ship next crosses the Tyrian Sea, its captain will not find all of Calernia a realm of the dead,” the blue-eyed princess said. “A cold comfort, but then I am Lycaonese: we are winter’s get.”
I leaned back. I recognized the cast to her face, it was the one she always had whenever I’d brought up the angel corpse over the years. She wasn’t going to be moved on this. And I could even see the grim sort of sense in it: like she’d said, even the most horrific of results was a better end than extinction and become soldiers in Keter’s service. On the other hand, she had to know that absolutely no one who had a decent chance of dying should that weapon be used – a number including every villain alive – would find this acceptable or be willing to tolerate her keeping the baton should they find out.
I held no illusions about the people who’d been my charges until recently: if the worst came to pass in Keter, they would be legging it through the Twilight Ways towards the closest port where Baalite ships docked. Learning that instead they were going to get an angel knife in the back might genuinely make a few of them desert and I wasn’t sure I blamed them. It would not be too hard a thing, I thought, to sweep this under my authority as Warden. Odds were Hanno would back me, and Ishaq doubtlessly would. Hells, I could just take the damn thing from her and it wasn’t like she had the strength to stop me.
It’d be a lie to say I was not tempted.
Silence hung between us. It might yet come to force, I thought, meeting those blue eyes. You have to know that. But for all that her holding that ivory length was putting a knife to my throat Cordelia had also extended trust, hadn’t she? She’d told me what she intended without being forced, pretty much admitting that she saw her duty to Calernia as something that came before even the oaths she’d sworn to me as Warden. One step forward and one step back, only it didn’t feel like we’d stayed still.
A noose was just a knot, until you’d killed someone with it.
“A complicated word,” I slowly repeated.
And left it at that.
For now.
The journey was restful in some ways, but in others it was not to be. That much became clear as the days passed.
I’d never particularly enjoyed cooking: it was a lot of tedious little chores followed by equally tedious looking over fires and ending up in a plate that never seemed to be quite as good as when made by others. Still, it would be shabby of me not to pull my weight so I’d learned to be solid with at least few recipes. Of those I liked hunter’s stew the best, since it was about as simple as cooking got, and I’d become a fair hand at it. There would be the usual bickering from the gallery about spices when time came to fill the bowls, I had no doubt, but that was part of the draw by now. Indrani sneering down on Callowan tastes and Vivienne going for her throat in retaliation was always good for a laugh.
Hells, back in the day even Akua got into it once or twice. Like most Praesi, she seemed convinced that any plate without a fistful of goddamned cumin sprinkled over it was unforgivingly bland.
I checked on the pot, finding the stew simmering, and stirred it a few times with the ladle before closing it again. I looked through the smoke as Masego sat across from me, long legs folding as he tried and failed to make himself comfortable perched atop a stone much too small for that. I thought of a praying mantis for a moment, looking at the long limbs, and almost laughed. To think he’d been pudgy when we first met. I could hardly even remember what that was like: he’d melted in the months leading up to the Tenth Crusade and never gained back the weight. Long robes and the black eye cloth, a golden glimmer beneath it, were what I saw in my mind’s eye when I thought of Masego nowadays.
“Won’t be ready for at least another hour,” I told him. “So if you were hoping for an early bowl-”
“I was not,” Zeze calmly replied. “I came to speak with you.”
I narrowed my eye at him. That sounded serious. I wiped the steel ladle on a cloth and set it down.
“I’m listening,” I told him.
He didn’t speak, at first, as if surprised I’d agreed so easily or unsure what he’d wanted to say.
“We have come a long way since the day we first met in Summerholm,” Masego said.
I half-smiled. By some counts, Apprentice could be said to be the first Named to join what was yet to become the Woe. He’d already been a master of his mantle when Hakram had only just begun to come into his.
“You’ve taken to chasing larger creatures than winged pigs,” I drawled.
He quietly laughed.
“Too many still breathe fire,” Zeze replied.
He paused, looking for words, and I gave him the space to think. There was rarely any gain to be had in rushing his mind.
“We have all changed,” Hierophant finally said, gold shining beneath cloth. “You do not seek the same ends you did back then, and you seek them differently.”
“Yeah,” I murmured. “I’ve been seeing that too. We’ve…”
Moved on, I refused to say, because if they were gone from my life what did I have left?
“It is inevitable,” Masego said. “The man who raised me is not the same who stood at Uncle Amadeus’ side during the Conquest. In overcoming circumstance we grow – or are buried, overcome by it.”
“I’d argue they were the same man,” I said. “Just standing in two different places, at two different times.”
Hardship and pleasure bent people in many ways but ultimately they were just colour on the canvas. They did not, could not define what the work was painted on. To my surprise, he smiled.
“I knew you would disagree,” he said. “You still believe in the line in the sand, the difference between right and wrong. I have grown to like that about you, Catherine.”
I cocked an eyebrow at him.
“Have you?” I drily asked.
He nodded.
“You try to make people stay on one side of the line,” Masego said. “And, more often than not, we are better off for it. It doesn’t always work, but I like that you try.”
I cleared my throat, looked away. He’d always been at his most dangerous when he was painfully earnest.
“But you don’t believe in that,” I said.
“I believed that we should try,” Masego honestly said. “You have shown me the value of that. But we’ve had this conversation once before, years ago. In the end-”
“- Creation ends,” I quietly finished. “So it’s not wrong to care about it, but it’s missing the point. We should be looking beyond the bars, not rearranging the inside of the cell.”
He looked pleased.
“So you do remember,” Masego said.
“This,” I said, “is about apotheosis, isn’t it?”
“You have all found purposes,” Hierophant said. “Hakram heals the people he once saw as a lost cause, Vivienne has traded the rooftop for the throne, Indrani has decided that instead of being Ranger she wants to be better than her. And you…”
He mulled over his words.
“You have decided to pull down the curtain on the Age of Wonders and usher what comes after with your own two hands,” Masego finally said.
“Everyone’s changed,” I slowly said, “except you. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I will break the shackles I was born bearing around my wrists,” Hierophant simply said. “I will open my mind to the secret of existence and burn with the truth of the godhead.”
I almost shivered. It was a nice evening out, warm with bright starlight and the merry gurgle of a stream right around the bend of the hill. And still I almost shivered, for though there had been no threat in my friend’s words neither had there been so much as a speck of doubt. Masego had become the Hierophant by peeking at the truths behind the curtain, laws mortals were not meant to understand, and he had been unwavering in his sole ambition ever since: he would become as a god, and then step beyond even that. I studied him, fingers clenching and unclenching.
“I feel,” I finally said, “as though I am being warned.”
“The Dead King awaits in Keter,” Hierophant evenly said. “And when I face him once more, Catherine, I will even the scales between us.”
“You want revenge for your magic,” I said.
“Revenge is not the right word,” he mused. “It is the bargain of an eye for an eye, and that is not a rule I abide by.”
Through the smoke, I saw Masego’s eye burn bright gold through the cloth.
“I will ruin him,” Hierophant said, his calm like that of a deep, dark lake. “I will make of Autumn’s crown a noose around his neck and make him watch as I tear out of him everything of worth.”
The fire crackled. Motes of gold danced on the smoke, as if traced by some luminous finger.
“I will use the sum of his works as a step for my own,” Hierophant told me, “and let him rot like a bloated carcass as I reach horizons he never so much as glimpsed.”
The dark-skinned man leaned forward, long braids sliding off his shoulder.
“That is what I promise Trismegistus King, and only then will I count us even for what passed between us,” Masego said.
I swallowed. These were not idle words, I knew. He wasn’t the kind of man to speak those. Masego genuinely meant to rip out the power of Neshamah and use it as part of his own apotheosis.
“Why tell me this?” I asked. “Why now?”
The glass eye’s light ebbed low, now little more than glimmers again.
“You made room for everyone else in the world you’re building, Catherine,” Masego said, then smiled.
He drew back and just like that there was no trace of the Hierophant left in him, none of the intensity that’d filled the air around likes a physical thing. As if it’d only ever been a trick of the light and the illusion had been broken the moment he moved.
“Remember to make room for me as well,” he asked.
I loved the man like a brother, and he loved me the same, but I knew a warning when I heard one. When the moment came for him to even the scales, if I stood in the way it would not be a small thing. That was what he’d been telling me.
If it came down to choosing between my dream and his own, his choice was already made.
I’d gotten used to my laundering being done for me.
Both the Army of Callow and the Legions had it as an assigned duty, but I’d never served at a rank where I might end up needing to kneel by the river shore and rub the dirt out of my clothes – or other people’s. I wasn’t unfamiliar with the chore, it was one of those we traded around when the Woe travelled together. Usually it was Vivienne who traded for it, she didn’t mind getting her hands bone cold, but she wasn’t along this time. So instead I found myself kneeling in the sand by Akua Sahelian, washing clothes in the stream. It was hard work, and rough on the hands, but there was only so much to wash and when it came to drying afterwards we cheated with magic.
The aftermath found us sitting on flat rocks by the river as we waited on the spell to finish getting the water out of the blankets. Akua had insisted on using a slower one, since apparently it didn’t damage the fabric.
“How do you even know that?” I asked. “If you tell me you’ve ever had to do your own laundry, I’m going to call you’re a liar.”
She rolled her eyes at me, the simple red and yellow robes she wore somehow managing to look tailored instead of plain.
“It is originally a spell meant to rid oneself out of contact poisons,” Akua said. “There’s nothing worse than a botched assassination attempt ruining your favourite dress.”
“Of course,” I drily replied. “How dare I ever think otherwise.”
“It is the common birth, I assume,” Akua kindly informed me. “I have reliably been informed that lowborn children are born with inferior minds.”
I glanced at her.
“Please tell me that’s not actually something one of your ancestors believed,” I pleaded.
Akua smiled beautifully.
“Not at all, dearest,” she said.
A pause.
“It was his Mirembe wife,” she told me. “There was a most fascinating treatise on the subject in the family library. Did you know that Callowans are also born naturally subservient? While I’ll admit I’ve yet to encounter such a specimen, very convincing experiments were executed to prove this.”
“I’m going to strangle you,” I cheerfully told her.
“Irrational anger in the face of one’s divinely ordained superior,” Akua noted. “I was warned it might happen.”
I tossed a stone in her direction, though she got a shield and a smug look up in time. My lips were quirking, though, and so were hers.
“So what’s your take on our guest?” I asked her.
She slid me a glance.
“Catherine Foundling,” Akua said, “are you soliciting me for gossip?”
“Indrani’s not there,” I complained. “And Masego doesn’t get the point. He always tries to be nice.”
She was grinning, now.
“She snores like a bear, did you notice?” the golden-eyed sorceress said.
“It was horrifying,” I admitted. “I couldn’t believe it was her at first, she’s always so dainty about everything. I’m impressed at how good she is with a bow, though.”
Cordelia had bagged us a pair of rabbits a few days back, which had been a pleasant addition to the cooking pot as well as a surprise.
“Lycaonese nobles are expected to hunt, I believe,” Akua said. “Not unlike Praesi, though presumably with fewer assassinations attached.”
“In my experience, that’s always a safe assumption when Praes is involved,” I said.
She snorted at me. It was light talk, nothing of politics or Keter or the many dooms ahead, and it made knots in my shoulders loosen. It was so rare, these days, that I could afford to just sit with someone by a river and talk. We must have spoken for an hour, far longer than the spell needed to finish, but I sensed she was as reluctant as I to acknowledge that and put an end to it. Eventually, though, it became harder to ignore that we would be awaited in camp. I sighed. Her expression immediately went blank, the highborn mask falling down over the lovely face. What had I done? I hesitated, but dimly I could sense that prodding at her now I was likely to lose a finger.
I kept to the silence instead, until humanity bled back into her face and she broke it herself.
“It would be easy,” Akua said, “to simply fall into your orbit again. I forget that, every time we are parted.”
She smiled at me, fondly but without amusement.
“Somehow I always forget that that it is not some subtle manipulation that you entrapped me with,” Akua said. “That you truly enjoy my company, and that is what makes it so very easy for you to win.”
“That’s not what I’m trying to do,” I said.
“It’s always what you’re trying to do, Catherine,” she replied with a strange gentleness. “It’s in your bone, the disease you inherited from the father you chose.”
My fingers clenched into a fist. That wound was still fresh. I wasn’t convinced it could ever be any other way.
“I’m not sure what it is you’re saying,” I said.
“I have had enough of cages,” Akua told me. “And choices being made for me.”
“You’re talking in circles,” I replied.
“If I choose to serve as the jailor of the King of Death,” she said, “it will not be at anyone else’s behest.”
“I’ve asked nothing,” I replied.
It had taken years for me to make it so I wouldn’t have to. It had gone wrong in Ater, all the small steps I’d taken. The moment they should have led up to never came to pass. There’d been too much going, and the Bard had put her fingers to the scale. Had the pivot passed, had I failed? Looking at her, seeing her looking at me, I had to consider the possibility that I had.
“Nor should you,” Akua said, gracefully rising to her feet. “Of all the debts I owe, the one I owe you is far from the heaviest.”
She began to gather the clothes, a clear sign the conversation was finished. And it left me wondering a question I would rather not have to entertain at all.
If I had failed, what then?
On our thirteenth night on the road we found the guide Sve Noc had sent us for the latter half of our journey to Serolen, waiting seated by a shallow river. The colours of my sigil painted on its face, Ivah of the Losara offered me a smile as it rose to its feet.
“First Under the Night,” Ivah said, bowing low, “it has been too long.”
