“What are you going to do?” Sibéal asked.
It all seemed abstract—a philosophical difference about the best uses of magic. That was, until the skimmers beached on the island and Kip saw the sudden fear in the Cwn y Wawr men’s eyes at the sight of Sibéal and at their sudden comprehension of who these people were.
The Cwn y Wawr, these hardened magic-using warriors, were terrified of the will-casters. Terrified through ignorance, partly, sure. But when you live in the forest, and you know the creatures there well, how scary is the idea of someone who can turn any one of those creatures against you, with the capabilities of the animal but the mind of a human? How terrifying is it that a person might take over your own body? How terrifying is it to actually meet the kind of people responsible for all the tales of the living dead and wolf men and worse?
To them, the name ‘Ghosts’ wasn’t a sarcastic reference to how ephemeral and helpless these homeless, bereaved wanderers were. To them, the Ghosts haunted the darkness of the forest, ready to turn nature or even your fellow man or your dead against you.
But trained warrior-drafters were scary, too. And these Cwn y Wawr were in bad shape, whether they knew it or not. They’d been freed from death or servitude, but they’d lost two precious things: their confidence and their honor. They’d lost their confidence in being betrayed and captured and needing to be rescued, and they’d lost their honor in pursuing a separate peace with the White King.
A soldier without confidence and honor is a breath away from becoming a brigand or gangster.
But it had always been a fool’s dream. Kip, leading men to destroy the White King himself? These two camps were like lodestones pushing against each other invisibly, endlessly.
Ergo, just flip one. They’ll fuse themselves together.
Right?
Kip stepped ashore without a word, without so much as a nod at the men standing there to ask him a question.
Drafting green from a thousand trees shining on each bank of the river in the noonday sun, he threw down steps and made a small platform to stand on. “We,” he declared, “are damaged but not dismayed, oppressed but not overwhelmed. We are the Broken, for when our oaths were tested, we broke them and ourselves. We were the despised: Here are my best friends. This world sees a bastard, an orphan, a hostage, a cripple, an idiot. I call them the Mighty. We—you—are outcasts all, the homeless driven from the lands where our mothers were buried. They have taken the light from our lives. Killed our loved ones, our friends. Taken our homes. Left us to wander as ghosts and feral dogs.”
He didn’t remember, afterward, much of what he said after that. He was looking at the faces, watching how they moved, the little twitches of expression. A man’s face is the surface of a pond, reflecting the sky, reflecting the trees, reflecting whatever is the object of his gaze and his love, the reflection hiding his depths. But when a wave passes, in the swell, for an instant, you can see what lies beneath the waters.
Their ears listened to his words, but their hearts inclined to the sincerity of his soul, deep calling unto deep: We have lost, but we are not lost. We have failed, he told them… but we can do better. We can be forgiven, we can make things new. This is not the end for us.
“They have taken the light from us. Yes. But now they expect us to cower like dogs beaten and fade like shades forgotten. But I don’t see dogs and shades here. Do they not know what they’ve begun? I see wolves. I see ghosts…”
He looked around at them as if they had forgotten who they were, and he was here to hold up a mirror for them that they might remember.
“Have you forgotten? Have they made you, for this brief hour, forget? Ghosts and wolves hunt at night. They think we cower, waiting for the light? Alone we are broken, bereaved, afraid. Together we are strong. Together we will hunt. In darkness, we will usher them into the final darkness. Alone we were weak and frightened. That time is past. Together, today, we are the Nightbringers.”
It ended with cheers, and tears, and not a single accusation that this person or that was disloyal or heretical or dangerous. Somehow it ended with a hundred and twenty will-casters, two hundred thirty Cwn y Wawr, and two hundred civilians swearing fealty to Kip.
And Kip’s fool dream that he might destroy the White King was like a babe stillborn, lying pallid and cold in his hands—taking sudden breath, stirring, squalling; thus was born his army.
Chapter 47
There was nothing special about the basement where Teia would commit her first murder. Other than, naturally, the four iron rings anchored in one wall, and the old man shackled spread-eagled between them.
Teia set down her candelabrum. If only it were so easy to lay aside her conscience. The old man was wearing slaves’ white. He was gagged, but he didn’t appear to have been beaten. Most importantly, he wasn’t blindfolded.
They didn’t care that he saw her face. Her last, dim hope had been that this was just a test to see if she’d do it—maybe this ‘slave’ was in fact a plant from the Order itself whose assignment was to see if she broke and tried to free him.
But that hope, like all hopes, drained away.
Master Sharp had left. He didn’t care. He’d given her no deadline at all, though obviously some lackey of the Order or someone hired by it was coming at some point to dispose of the body.
If there was no body here, Teia would be exposed as either disobedient or incapable of the work the Order had for her to do. Either would be a death sentence for her.
This was literally his life or hers.
The man looked at her with a slave’s hooded wariness. You tried not to betray too much as a slave, lest your fear or hatred or disgust or longing earn you a beating.
‘Earn.’ Orholam damn us all.
She could see him trying to place her so that he might guess what to expect: Traders’ clothes, perhaps? Young—she had always looked young for her age, which was made worse by her short hair and what looked like mere skinniness when her clothes covered her arms and shoulders. She probably didn’t look too frightening to him, though. Just a slip of a girl, she was.
No, old man, I am death come for you.
“This shouldn’t hurt,” Teia said.
Slaves had superstitions about who was the most likely to be brutal to them. Insecure wives, drunkards, slave owners barely rich enough to own slaves but desperate to do so to prove their status, the youngest children in wealthy households, and that particular breed of rich luxiat that strained under the hypocrisy of keeping slaves while Orholam taught that all men were brothers. Where did Teia fit? this man was wondering. Sometimes a very young girl didn’t see a slave as a slave. He might be a playmate, an adult kinder than others because he gave her his time.
Sooner or later, they learned.
“Not until the end, anyway,” she said.
That was another evil of slavery, wasn’t it? How it twisted not only the enslaved, but their owners as well. Teia had seen the worst impulses of her onetime playmate Sarai not only tolerated but encouraged as far as slaves were concerned. Surely every child has terrible impulses. Surely every mother says, ‘No, child, don’t hit!’ Except a slaveholder says, ‘No, child, you may only hit Kallas or Elpis!’
And Kallas was twisted by accepting the blows of his mistress’s brats. And Elpis was twisted by her weekly rapes at her master’s hands. And her master was twisted by thinking it was natural and moral, his right.
This is why Orholam hates slavery, as he hates divorce and war. But he tolerates them. They are his compromises with humanity, with the hardness of our hearts. For who could imagine a world without any of those?
She let loose a cloud of paryl from her palm, and then, given the darkness of the room, she remembered her dark spectacles, and took them off.