“Thank you,” Destin said, relieved. “Shall we return to the others?”
Harper dangled the thimble in front of Destin. “You should give this back to Hal, to keep him safe.” She wore a mask of innocence, but Destin was used to reading faces to see what lay underneath.
She’s trying to figure out where he is, whether he’s close, whether I’m going to see him, Destin thought. He closed her hand over the thimble. “You can give it back to him yourself when you see him. Now, when we walk back into the other room, it’s important that you appear properly chastened, as if I’ve spent this time schooling you on the consequences of defying the king. I am not the sort of man who delivers hope to political prisoners.”
“Maybe you are,” Harper said, giving him an appraising look. And then she drew her head in and rounded her shoulders as if she expected a blow to fall at any moment. She fixed her eyes on the floor, her lower lip trembling. The transformation was stunning. She was like a snake shedding one skin and putting on another.
You’re not like either of your brothers, Destin thought. You lack their bone-deep instinct for honesty. You might have a future as a spy.
39
REUNION
Lyss sat her horse and watched her fledgling cavalry go through its maneuvers on the parade ground. It was an exercise in frustration. Her soldiers seemed unable to communicate with their mounts in a meaningful way. Every move the horses made seemed to surprise their riders, with sometimes disastrous results.
“Left TURN!” she shouted. “Now, forward!”
Once again the columns dissolved into chaos, horses rearing and showing their teeth. Several riders ended up on the ground.
“Ghezali!” she shouted to one of the field officers. “I said five paces before the turn.”
Ghezali stared at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. Which she was, in a way. Given that the Carthian army was a mix of nationalities, she used Common as the language of command. She was improving in Carthian—in military vocabulary, at least—but this job was hard enough without hunting for words all day long.
“What is the point of riding back and forth across the field in pretty formations?” Tully Samara nudged his horse closer. “This is a battle, not a dance. Why does it matter how they get to the enemy as long as they get there?”
“Use your eyes,” Lyss said, in no mood to indulge the shiplord’s constant questions. “The idea is to train the soldier so that, in the heat of battle, he or she can act without thinking.”
And if you can’t train the man, you train his horse.
“Ghezali!” she shouted. “Go back to the saber-and-lance exercises you practiced yesterday, this time using all gaits,” Lyss said, giving up on the complexities of turning. “Make fifty passes across the grounds, and you’re done for the day.”
Right now, the bloodsworn were as likely to cut up each other as the enemy, which needed fixing. Except the enemy might be her own Highlander army. That was one of many reasons her head was pounding.
Samara knew next to nothing about land-based warfare, and Lyss had no desire to tutor him. Yet he’d ridden out to join her as soon as he spotted her drilling the cavalry. It seemed he was constantly at her side—when he wasn’t attending the empress—asking questions and challenging Lyss’s answers. He obviously saw her as his rival, given that nearly everyone else on the island was bloodsworn. He resented that Lyss had been given command of the army, and she knew he’d be happy to seize the opportunity to sabotage her efforts or carry tales to the empress. She wished he would go back to sea. And, preferably, drown.
She didn’t need the distraction, given the delicate balancing act she was trying to pull off. So she watched the horses sluice back and forth across the parade ground and did her best to ignore him.
She had no intention of grooming an army capable of defeating her Highlanders. What was bad for the Carthian army was good for the Fells. Yet failure had its own risks, especially with Samara taking such an interest in what she was doing. The empress was no fool. Lyss had to make a show of competence, or risk ending up in that mob of bloodsworn, probably under Samara’s command. Nearly every night, she’d wake up, sweating, from that nightmare.
Still, it was so damned hard to do less than her best. Lyss had spent years assessing soldiers, making the most of their strengths, and working around their weaknesses. The more she worked with the empress’s army, the more she realized that what had worked well in the Fells didn’t apply here. She’d always used her soldiers as independent agents, capable of making their own decisions and strategy changes, even in the heat of battle. She had prioritized conserving and protecting her troops, since they were usually outnumbered by the southerners. With the exception of Queen Court and a few other battles, she had avoided confronting the enemy straight on. Her tactic of choice was a series of hit-and-run skirmishes that destroyed enemy morale and wore the enemy down. That had suited the soldiers she led in the terrain they were fighting in. Against overwhelming odds, it had kept Arden out of the north.
These troops had no fear of death, and felt no pain, so they had no need for a personal strategy of survival. They simply charged forward, howling, swinging their curved blades and cudgels, until they rode down the enemy or their horses were cut out from under them.
Lyss found herself constantly playing both sides, considering how to best use the assets she had, and how to best counter them in the field. This would be great preparation for fighting Celestine’s forces if she ever got the chance.
In the meantime, her training strategy gradually shifted, until she was no longer training an army that could succeed in the mountains of the Fells. Instead, she was doing her best to train an army that could succeed in the flatlands of Arden.
As she watched, a shadow passed across the parade ground. The horses panicked, rearing and screaming out a warning, dumping several riders to the ground. Lyss looked up, shading her eyes, and saw a winged creature swoop down toward the horses. Its leathery wings all but spanned the parade ground. It glittered in the sun, as if it were covered with blue, purple, and gold armor—or maybe jewels. It seized one of the horses, executed an awkward turn, and then, wings beating hard, it began to climb, heading out to sea again.
Swearing, Samara yanked his bow from his saddle boot and sent an arrow flying. He was a good shot—it pinged against the creature’s armor and fell into the water. Lyss watched the beast until it disappeared into the sun.
“Thrice-cursed dreki,” Samara spat. “That’s twice this week it’s gone after the horses.”
Turning her attention back to her troops, Lyss saw that one rider had taken a particularly bad spill. He stood, his foot at an impossible angle, and limped toward the barracks.
Lyss shuddered.
“Trust me, General, you feel it more than he does,” Tully Samara said. “You must develop a thicker skin.”
“If only we had bloodsworn horses,” Lyss said, shaking her head sadly, “and bloodsworn ships. We’d be unstoppable.”
Samara smiled thinly. “I understand that there are more of your countrymen on the way to join the bloodsworn. That should make you feel at home.” Having planted his daily thornbush, Samara heeled his horse and trotted away.
But even a thornbush grows a flower sometimes. And sometimes the loveliest flower has poison at its heart.
That afternoon, Lyss met with the empress on her pavilion by the sea. The empress’s current favorite, Tarek, was there, fanning her with a palm leaf and feeding her sugared grapes from a golden bowl. He was very young, extraordinarily handsome, and absolutely terrified.
“You should choose a lover, General,” Celestine said, licking sugar from her lips. “You are welcome to Tarek when I am finished with him.” She patted his cheek fondly.