We walk in silence to the guesthouse as dread grows in my heart. Khamu and Mis are eating porridge while Ro regales the dame council and the elders with a passionate speech. The instant he sees us coming, he stops speaking.
Kal pauses politely at the bottom of the steps so everyone will notice he has arrived, but he doesn’t wait for an invitation to approach. He climbs up to the porch and offers a series of Honored Dames and Honored Sirs to the assembled elders before turning to Khamu.
“We need to turn south at once. Khamu, you grew up near here. Is there a way we can approach the Royal Road without being seen, to make sure it’s safe before we risk using it?”
“Yes, my lord. I know a path that only locals dare take.”
“Very well.” Again he addresses the elders, who are staring at him as at a branch that has revealed itself to be a snake. “My thanks for your hospitality. I promise you, whatever has been requisitioned or stolen from your village will be repaid. For now, we need the loan of fresh mounts.”
Ro stands. “So. How quickly you abandon your performance as a humble groom, Lord Kalliarkos.”
Ro is taller and bigger but Kal doesn’t give way. He doesn’t know how to give way; he’s a prince of the realm.
“A massive foreign army has broken through the frontier on the Eastern Reach. Nikonos is in league with them. There can be nothing more important than stopping this threat.”
“I won’t deny it, but if you don’t mind my saying so, my lord, I don’t see any difference between these latest Saroese invaders and your ancestors.”
“I think you and I know the situation is more complex now.” In the last few months, serving in an army chased by defeats, Kal has undergone a fierce test, like metal in a forge, and been hammered into a harder person. “I am Efean born. I am not my ancestors.”
“Of course you aren’t, my lord.” Ro opens a hand, palm up, as a question. “Yet if you and Garon Palace do overthrow our new child-murdering king and his complicit sister-queen instead of being slaughtered yourselves, what then? Will you and your sister, Lady Meno?, rule as king and queen justly and wisely over your fawningly grateful subjects, Patron and Commoner both? As your ancestors have done for a hundred years?”
“The danger to Efea isn’t from me. It’s from Nikonos’s weakness. I’m sure his East Saroese allies intend to overthrow him once they make sure my sister and I are gone and they can make Efea a province of East Saro. Is that what you want?”
“I want justice.”
Then they both look at me, like they are waiting for me to agree with one or the other.
Irritation spikes through me. I’m not the victor’s ribbon in the victory tower, waiting to be claimed.
I’m the adversary.
“You two are both missing the obvious. At the moment we are fugitives and Nikonos is king. He will have all of us executed if he catches us. So we need to reach my father before Nikonos does. Right now.”
“The general’s valiant daughter has no time for nonsense,” Ro remarks in Efean to the council, who are trying to sort out the new dynamics at play as Kal asserts himself. No one laughs. Nothing about this is amusing.
We gulp down a thick porridge and set out again on fresh mules, accompanied by ten villagers. They carry field and carpentry tools as if they are weapons, but all I can think of is how quickly they will be cut down by armored soldiers wielding swords, spears, and arrows.
As we head south, Kal taps my knee. “Jes, promise me you’ll run if there’s trouble, not charge straight into it.”
“I never charge into trouble unless I’ve considered all my options and decided it’s the only choice.”
His lips tug up. “It was worth a try.”
Sun bakes the dusty ground until it shimmers like an oven. Soon the terrain starts to drop in ragged tiers toward the narrow coastal plain. A dark strip running parallel to the coast must be the Royal Road. I’m sure I see ships out on the distant water but the late-afternoon haze makes it hard to tell. We halt at the edge of the last, steepest drop, hand the mules back to the villagers, and bid them farewell before descending a slope into a mucky depression, a diseased-looking marsh that spreads east and west as far as I can see.
My soft leather boots are soon grimy with muck, but it isn’t true mud that sticks and clumps but rather a slippery sheen that reeks. Tears stream from my eyes and my nostrils itch from the stench of oozing petroleum seeps. In front of me Mis sneezes twice, then murmurs a prayer for the safety of her shadow, since sneezing can dislodge the shadow-soul. But when I check, hers is still stuck to her, rippling across the islets of plug grass we use as stepping-stones.
An antelope caught in the mire is far gone in decay. Insects who drowned trying to feast on its viscera float in an oily sheen, eddying up against its whitening skull.
Palms and sycamores mark a village ahead. All I can think about is the chance to pour a bucket of cold water over my head. I hustle after Mis through empty lanes and into the center square—where we run straight into a crowd of villagers facing down a column of soldiers wearing the royal sea-phoenix.
I spin desperately to warn away Kal, but he has already halted out of sight. The soldiers mark Mis and me as grubby Commoner girls, nothing of interest. The sergeant is laboriously attempting to inform the village men that he will pay for supplies and that the villagers need to flee immediately… but he doesn’t speak Efean and they don’t speak Saroese.
Are these Nikonos’s men?
A crow suddenly appears. It circles us and lands on a nearby roof to study our faces with keen interest.
“Do you recognize that crow?” I murmur to Mis.
“Why would I recognize a crow?”
“At Crags Fort, with the spider scouts. Don’t you remember the priest who’d had his eyes put out and saw through the eyes of his crows? My father has spider scouts with his army, and each squad has a crow priest.”
“I’m more worried about these soldiers right here, Jes.”
But I have a feeling, just as I do on the Fives court, that this is an opening I can take. I extend an arm and the crow flaps down to land on my wrist, feet tightening on my skin. It bobs once, then flies off. That decides me. I step forward.
“Sergeant, may I help? I speak both Saroese and Efean.”
My proper Saroese speech startles him. His kit is filthy, his face bristling with a stubbly beard, and he looks as exhausted as I feel, but he nods as if my presence is a relief. “Thank the gods. Can you tell these people we don’t want grain? I’ve been sent to collect oil and naphtha.”
“You’re with the Royal Army, under the command of General Esladas?”
Instead of indicating his sea-phoenix tabard, he taps a firebird badge sewn to the cloth. “Proud to be so.”
“I thought you were dug in at Port Selene, holding the eastern approach into Efea.”
“The enemy’s army is too large. We had to retreat.”
Father is marching straight toward Nikonos.
More curtly than I intend, I say, “You must take us to him.”