He didn’t resent it.That was the worst part—and the best. He feared what it meant to need it. He feared more what it meant not to.
On the span’s edge, a Maidaner boy—broom-handle spear, eyes too new for this light—watched him with the look you give a god you haven’t decided is yours. Rakhal stopped and took the spear and retied the knife with a knot that wouldn’t betray its owner at the first scream. “Don’t run,” he said, and the boy nodded solemnly, as if he’d been given a riddle whose answer the day would teach.
The court emptied, embarrassed by its own architecture. A gust came between the buildings and found the river; the water lifted its head to listen. The sunlight, such as it was, turned the curdled surface to dull metal. When Rakhal leaned his palm on the parapet, the stone felt warm—blood, not sun.
He listened because he could not help it. The river muttered in a language older than prayers. It sounded like men telling their wives they would be late and never arriving. It sounded like boots not marching anymore. It sounded like the Shadow under the arches trying to pronounce its own name and failing on the first syllable because it had learned too many ways to be called and had forgotten which one was true.
“Report,” Shazi shouted from the far end of the span, already choreographing a day that refused choreography.
“Later,” Eliza answered for him, and in that word she put an arm between Rakhal and the world without making a scene of it.
He didn’t thank her. He watched the water run black under the Lion Bridge and saw there the reflections of men who had been here and would be here and might be forgiven if the city learned how. The whispers rose with the mist, and if you believed childish things, you could say they were ghosts. He didn’t need ghosts to make a warning. He had his own echoes.
The bridge held. That was truth, not prophecy. But the river carried away everything that fell into it, and it was very patient with stones, and men were never stones for very long. The dark at his heel licked the hand he’d used to hold it back, friendly as a wolf that knows how doors work. He drew that hand into his cloak so no one would see it shake again, and he let the whispers talk themselves hoarse on the black water while the light pretended to be day.
Chapter
Sixty-Eight
The inner keep had never loved people. It loved procedure. The stones were planed so flat they rejected footsteps; the corridors measured light at strict intervals, as if miserliness with shadow made rulership real. Eliza’s vanguard moved through the first courtyard and into the grand hall like a slice of night on a whetstone—narrow, sharp, intent. The outer gates were already theirs; the Lion Bridge held. Now they climbed the last ribs of the city’s cage.
The central doors had been smashed and braced badly; two crossbars lay splintered on the tiles, a third hung like a broken axle. Captain Liron shouldered through the gap with a grunt, Maera at his back, the twins after, and five more—dockwrights with knotted hands and eyes too old to kneel cleanly. Shazi had already split off with half their strength to strangle the side stair. There would be no flanking if she had breath in her.
Eliza entered last, as she had since she was old enough to know that leading from the front is for narrow corridors and narrow minds. A queen walks last so that when death turns, it meets her and not the people she asked to believe.
The great hall ran long and bright, but its brightness was wrong; one of the stained-glass windows had been shattered andpatched with greased cloth. Light came in at a poor angle, the color of fat. The throne at the far end sat on a raised dais of cracked marble, half of one lion’s paw snapped clean, the other ground smooth by boots.
There he was?—
Vael Nareth.
The Ketheri king reclined there as if he had taken a room at an inn he did not prefer: impatient, bored, eager to be flattered, more eager to be obeyed.
He wore white enamel over quilted silk, pauldrons chased with gilded cats that curled as if pleased with themselves. His hair shone with oil. He had a swordsman’s calluses and a courtier’s mouth. On a table beside the throne lay a goblet and a map—Maidan drawn as if it had never belonged to anyone who would resist him.
He looked at Eliza and smiled the way men do when they recognize a problem and desire it. “You took your time,” he said, voice trained to fill rooms. “I nearly grew old waiting for this ghost to arrive.”
Eliza let her gaze pass over him and land on the part of the lion’s paw that had broken. Weather had done it, not war. “I was busy feeding your army to crows.”
He laughed. “Do you think I care for losses? The countryside is a granary of sons. You won’t exhaust my forces, Eliza Ducanis. Not you. Not here. Surely, by now, you must have gained a sense of perspective. Of proportion. Maidan is to Ketheri as a boat is to a flotilla.” His hand traced a lazy line across the map. “Maidan’s gates open, Maidan’s markets sell, Maidan’s scholars serve—under my seal, not the monsters you housed in your tower. Is that not an improvement?”
Liron shifted by the pillar to Eliza’s left; his jaw set in the way hers did when she wanted to break a sentence on someone’steeth. She moved one finger a hair and he stilled, though she felt the want of motion reroute itself into his legs.
“Improvement,” she repeated, as if trying the shape of the word. “Your men drag artisans by the throat to repair war machines that were never ours and never will be. Your gaolers feed scholars to labs to buy a patent on pain. You hang bread high enough that children learn reverence for hunger.” She shrugged, a small thing with great meaning. “We define the term differently.”
He sat up, amused. “You came to negotiate with rhetoric.” He flicked a glance at his officers arrayed along the hall’s right side, and they laughed on cue. Their white enamel made him look cleaner than he was. “Let us improve matters. I offer you the lives of your citizens in exchange for your surrender. Lay down your arms, bend your knee, and I will be merciful. Refuse, and I hang ten for every one of my soldiers you’ve killed. We will string them along the Lion Bridge and teach your new god how to count.”
Behind Eliza’s breastbone, iron cooled and warmed in a single pulse. She touched the chain beneath her armor. The counter-sigil was a dull weight, no brighter than a bit of river stone; still, she felt it answer her calm with a faint acknowledgment. It was agreement, warm and anchoring.
Hold steady,she told herself.Let him show them what he is.
“Your men aren’t gods,” she said. “They’re clerks with swords. You bought this city with promises and a hole in a tower. You think that makes you clean.”
He ignored that because men like him tend to disregard truths they did not invent. “Kneel,” he said mildly, as if asking a child to wash hands. “Be queen of this place under my name, and I will let you keep your face.” His eyes flicked down her figure the way a knife flicks, and he smiled.
Eliza did not smile. “You want me to bless your theft,” she said. “You want my mouth to drink from your cup so my people will drink from your chain. I won’t.”
The king sighed, theatrically patient. “Stubborn. It would have been kinder to the city to accept. Very well.” He clapped once. “Bring them.”
