Vicarian laughed and took a pose. The initiation hadn’t changed him so much, then. She came forward and embraced him, and there was no strange heat, no sense that he had changed. It felt good having her boy back in her arms. Two of her boys.
“So,” she said. “You’ve studied the cult of the spider goddess. Has she made you pious at last?”
“You know,” Vicarian said, taking her arms in a way uncomfortably similar to Vincen, “I think it actually may have.”
He led Clara down the corridor toward the drawing room. The servants scurried around them like mice.
“A pious priest,” Jorey said. “That’s a miracle to begin with.”
“No,” Vicarian said, his voice becoming serious. “No, really. There was nothing I learned in any of the studying I did before this that compares. The goddess isn’t just a set of stories we’ve gathered up and decided to guide our lives by. She’s real.”
“I would have said thinking God was real was obligatory for a priest,” Clara said, stepping into the room. The dust covers had been removed and a fire set in the grate. Vicarian shook his head.
“You would, wouldn’t you? But the seminary isn’t like that. We talk and we read and we pray, but it’s corrupt. It’s all empty and corrupt, because you only have to say that you believe. With the goddess, it’s not like that at all. It’s … hard sometimes. But she opened the world for me.”
Clara smiled and nodded.
I’ve lost him too, she thought.
Geder
Until he was set to travel across Elassae with three hundred sword-and-bows as his personal guard, Geder hadn’t understood how exhausted his men had become. They pulled themselves up in the morning, thin-faced and ash-skinned. They broke down camp, loaded the carts, and moved across the fields and hills where no dragon’s road led. Even the mounted men seemed to sag down in the saddles. They looked to Geder like the spirits of the dead that were supposed to ride with his armies. The short days and cold weather meant stopping to make camp when it hardly seemed past midday, and then long nights in his tent. Geder was torn between the tugging impatience to be with Cithrin in Suddapal and a horrified sympathy for the men, brought to this sad state by Ternigan’s mismanagement.
“Do you think he meant this to happen?” he asked Basrahip one night after they’d finished a meal of chicken and rice. Peasant food, but more than the soldiers had.
“I do not know, Prince Geder,” Basrahip said. “And he is beyond all asking now.”
The leather walls of the tent popped and boomed in the wind. Outside, there were no trees, but a forest of stumps. Everything had been harvested for the fires of the army months before. The farms stripped, the animals slaughtered, and the countryside left bare. Even the low brown grass of winter seemed dead beyond reclaiming. It looked to Geder like the empty plates left after a feast. A world that had been eaten. He couldn’t imagine how it would be coaxed to bloom again in spring. The burned farmhouses would sow no seeds, the unturned fields wouldn’t raise up grain or fruit. If there had been cattle or sheep, they were dead now, or else spirited underneath the mountain at Kiaria. The war had left wounds on the body of the land that would take years to heal, and even then there would be scars. Geder found himself wanting badly to be away.
Basrahip sucked thoughtfully on the bones of the birds, stripping the last slivers of flesh from them. His plate was a pile of pink sticks in a jumble.
“I was thinking,” Geder said. “It might be wiser to go on ahead. We’re almost to Suddapal. If we took a dozen of the strongest men and rode fast, we’d be on the outskirts of the city in two days at most.”
“If you would like,” Basrahip said.
“But do you think it would be safe?”
Basrahip turned his calm gaze on Geder and smiled.
“It will not matter if we fall now. Even if we do, others will come and carry her banner. The will of the goddess is alive in the world. You are her chosen and I am her basrahip. And even we are—” He paused, looking around him. He picked up a thin, rubbery bone. “Even we are as this before her.”
“Yes,” Geder said. “I don’t actually find that as reassuring as you might expect.”
Basrahip laughed as if Geder had made a joke.
That night, Geder sat up, unable to sleep. The only sounds were the wind and the moaning of his suffering men. He’d read reports of winter campaigns, and they had all sounded unpleasant, frankly miserable, but they hadn’t prepared him for this. Sitting at his camp desk with a small lantern, he watched his breath ghosting. He didn’t like to think of it, but perhaps Ternigan’s treachery was only partly to blame. Almost all the men of fighting age had spent most of a year in Asterilhold before they went to Sarakal, and now Elassae. Even with the will and power of the goddess working for them, there were limits to how much work a body could do. It was clear now that Ternigan, whether through incompetence or malice, had done the army terrible damage. There was a part of Geder that wanted to send them all home, to let them rest. Only that would leave the heart of the Timzinae conspiracy still safely in their stronghold.