“Praise the Sorcerer General!”
The call pealed across the crowd with the force of a tolling temple bell, harkening them to silence.
“Praise the Deathspell beneath which he shelters us!” Atop the carriage, Seth paused and looked across the fearful faces staring up at him.
“Praise the Verdugo,” Tiago whispered from the carriage’s rear.
Seth flapped a hand behind his back in annoyance. “Praise the Verdugo and make way!”
Across the square, the roadhouse’s slatted door opened, and Annalise strutted out, hands on her hips. “How’s she cutting, lads?” She smiled from beneath the brim of her hat. “No pun intended.”
Seth climbed from the carriage as, atop the scaffold, the Corregidor of Shaldor sputtered with confusion. “Uh, Your Grace, uh—Madam Verdugo, I mean. We were expecting Verdugo Erheis—”
“He’s dead,” Annalise said, with the prim patience of a woman already anticipating next year, when she’d finally be able to stop repeating it. “I’m his replacement, Annalise al Ydris. Those are my kids, Tiago and Ofelia, and that’s my sweetheart Seth, who just had his first muster call. Good job, love.”
Seth gave a brief salute from the carriage’s front step. “Thanks. Hello.” As Annalise launched into the rest of her pre-judgment patter, he moved to the rear of the carriage and gave a light punch to Tiago’s arm. “I knew the line, man. C’mon.”
“Why’d you freeze up, then?”
“I didn’t freeze up,” Seth said. “It was for effect.”
Tiago smirked. “You hear that, Feeli? Dad’s doing drama.”
Seth gave a somewhat-less-light punch to Tiago’s arm. Despite their professed plans never to do so, Tiago and Ofelia had gone back on their word aftering discovering how annoyed Seth got when they called him dad.
“I got what he was doing,” Ofelia supplied from the carriage interior. “You have no theatricality in your soul.”
“You do it next time, then,” Tiago said.
“I have no theatricality in my soul, either,” Ofelia said. “I’m content with it.”
“Sword, please,” Annalise called.
Tiago and Seth moved simultaneously; Seth halted and gave a formal bow of permission. “I’d just freeze in the middle of the crowd.”
Tiago hefted the executioner’s blade to his shoulder. “Let’s assassinate him, Feeli.”
“Okay,” Ofelia said absentmindedly. She was attempting to teach herself crochet, a guidebook open in her lap; the lumpy results of her first attempt hung sadly from her hook.
An ohhh rose from the crowd as Annalise unsheathed her sword and the blood fountained forth from the scabbard. A scrawny man in the middle of the kneeling lineup of prisoners began to weep.
Tiago stalked back to the carriage, his arm spattered with scabbard-blood to the shoulder. “Gusher today.”
“Why does it do that, anyway?” Seth asked.
“Keeps the hexis sealed into the dynamos,” Tiago said. “Without it we’d lose a soul’s worth a season or so.”
“I know that bit,” Seth said. “Just why does it shoot out that way?”
“I’ve wondered the same thing,” Tiago said. “Speeds the draw for the Verdugos who aren’t built like brick shithouses, perhaps.”
“I always thought it was for effect.” Ofelia extracted her hook from a snarl she’d made and began methodically untangling it.
“Let’s not get back on effect.” Tiago squinted out at the scaffold. Annalise was crouching in front of the crying man, as he sobbed and choked and shook his stubbled head.
“A term in the Winter War is only three months,” she said. “That’s better than the jailhouse for three decades. Someone gave me that chance, once, and I reckon you deserve it, too. But it’s your choice.”
“I’m—I—Madam Verdugo.” The man was crying so hard he was having trouble keeping his eyes open. “I’m afraid.”
“So was Jamie,” Annalise said, gentle but unyielding. “And it’s too late to comfort him. I know you’d go back and fix it if you could, Austen. But there’s no magic that’ll turn the clock back. I’d be the first in line if there was, believe you me.” She helped him to his feet. “Now, you can serve your sentence out in the pen over Fontana’s way, and come out with the better part of your life wasted. Or you can put it on the line and make it something like right.”
Austen swallowed a quantity of sobby snot. “I’ll serve.”
“All right, Austen. Thank you.” Annalise clasped the man’s shaking shoulders. “Be brave, and keep your fellows safe, and trust in the Legion, and you’ll get yourself back home. And no matter what they say about you, they’ll never deny your redemption.”
Tiago sighed as his mother resumed her journey across the line of convicts. “Do me a favor, il Gutierre?”
Seth glanced from the scaffold. “What’s that?”
“Can you get into some kind of argument with her next head-taking day? So she can be in a bad mood and actually collect some damn hexis?”
“We’re ahead of schedule, aren’t we?”
Ofelia pulled the travel kettle from its hook and poured herself more tea. “Tiago’s Tiago-ing.”
“We’re on schedule.” Tiago reached into the carriage past her and retrieved a folded map. “Ahead is a stretch.”
Ofelia gestured the kettle toward Seth inquisitively. He nodded, and she rummaged around for another cup.
“There are some spots I’d love to skip.” Tiago flattened the map out on a wide beam of the carriage wall. “Like there’s this township here I’ve been hearing about. Shipfarrok.”
Seth squinted over his shoulder. “Sheepfuck’s on your route?”
“You’ve heard of it?”
“Sure I have.”
“Well, it’s optional for us.” Tiago pointed to the dotted underline beneath Shipfarrok’s name. “It’s not chartered. Shouldn’t even be a Corregidor there.”
“And you don’t wanna visit?” Seth accepted the chipped cup full of tea that poked out the window. “Thanks, Feeli.”
“You’re quite welcome.”
“Do I want to visit the town nicknamed Sheepfuck? No, I do not.” Tiago folded the map and tossed it back into the carriage as his mother paced the boards. “No charter means they aren’t regular tributes for the Verdugo. That leads to resentment. And also the nickname.”
“Mostly it’s just on account of how it sounds similar,” Seth said. “I hear there’s some truly astonishing overlooks.”
“Full funds back to the lady you scammed, plus twoscore solitars,” Annalise proclaimed, at the scaffold. “And we’ll have a sorry, yeah?”
“Sorry,” grunted the woman whose head she hadn’t taken.
“Have you been?” Tiago asked.
“What, to Sheepfuck?” Seth sipped his tea. “No way.”
“Feeli.” Annalise beckoned. “C’mere to me, girl.”
Ofelia put her attempt at crochet aside and unfolded herself from the carriage. “Duty calls.”
Tiago picked up the fiber-art disaster she was generating. “I’ll just toss this, yeah?”
“Don’t dare,” Ofelia said, and threaded her way through the crowd.
Tiago nudged Seth. “Good job on the call, by the way. Unironically.”
“Thanks, Tiago,” Seth said.
“First time I did it, my voice cracked.”
“Well, that’s puberty for you.”
“Don’t I know it.” Tiago watched his sister ascend the steps stoically. “Two braces says she tastes shit up there.”
“I’ll take that bet.”
But whatever the accused man said to Ofelia, the neutral look and the shake of her head told them no lie had been detected and no shit tasted. Tiago tendered his coins with grumbling resignation.
Two more minor felonies and the day was over. Annalise and Ofelia returned across the dispersing square, laughing at some joke the al Ydris ladies declined to share.
“Right-o, boys.” Annalise accepted a handkerchief from Tiago and wiped a fleck of blood from her face. “Reckon we can make ourselves scarce now. Roadhouse gave me its best room, and I felt like I was sleeping on a buncha twigs. Might as well rest on the hoof.”
“Works for me,” Tiago said.
Annalise’s hand strayed to Seth’s and tucked it into her sheltering grip. “You two hop back on the road and we’ll rendezvous out by the Mazulie campground. We’ll catch up.”
“Okay,” Ofelia said. “Still hunting Seth’s Darkness?”
Annalise smacked her lips. “Yep. Still looking.”
“It’s funny. I’d really have thought you’d find it by now with how often you look.”
Annalise’s witchfire eyes rolled. “Smartarse.” She gave Seth a gentle bump with her hip. “She’s just slagging us, Sethy. It’s barely been two weeks since you turned. Took her and Tiago roundabout a month.”
Ofelia climbed onto the front boot and started tying the horses to the carriage shaft. “It took me twenty-six days, in point of fact.”
“Twenty-four here,” Tiago added. “So if you still don’t know after that, there’s something extremely wrong and we’ll all panic.”
“Great,” Seth said.
“All right, Clever Clogs. Piss off and help your sister. And take this.” Annalise handed Tiago the executioner’s blade. “Love you loads, boyeen.”
Tiago acknowledged his mother’s affection with a flap of his hand as he strolled away to tend the pulling team.
Annalise and Seth waved the carriage out onto the dusty highway. The newest member of their entourage, the patient palfrey Seth had run off with, trotted alongside the wagon team. She had little to do as of yet, since Seth spent more time on Demetrius’ back than hers, but at the inflated rate they’d paid for her they couldn’t just give her away.
“Lovely horse,” Annalise said.
“She is,” Seth said. “Sorry for the trouble she caused.”
“We’ll call those whole couple days a mulligan,” she said. “You come up with a name for her yet?”
“Still pondering,” he said, because he hadn’t come up with anything better than Annalise al Equis and that would surely not fly.
A hand crept into Seth’s back pocket. Annalise’s thumb stuck into the inverse of his waistband. “So,” she said.
“So,” he said.
Her hips nestled against his from behind. “Sooo,” she purred, chin perched atop his head. “Wanna fuck in the woods?”
“What a pickup line.”
“Looking to get picked up?” Her touch tightened. “I can do that.”
“No. Hey. Wait. Annali—hey, hey—”
Seth’s lover boosted him off the ground, slung him over her shoulder like a cave woman with a kill, and strutted toward the waiting Demetrius, who gave her an unimpressed snort. The stragglers and pedestrians who hadn’t made themselves scarce after the business of the day openly gawked at the display.
Seth play-acted a struggle. “There’s people watching.”
She swung him forward from her shoulder into her thick-hewn arms and leaned her lips to his ear. “Where I’m taking you,” she whispered, “there won’t be.”
They really did mean to find Seth’s Darkness. And they often tried, after they’d slaked themselves in one another. But the true fruits of Seth and Annalise’s investigations into the Plainland forests tended to be interesting new surfaces to fuck against.
They told themselves they did this in order to cool their appetites so they wouldn’t mess around in their tent in the evenings, when Tiago and Ofelia retired to the carriage and there was a risk they’d be heard. But most nights, Seth’s hands would creep a little too low while they embraced, or Annalise would take one deep breath of his hair too many, or their kiss would linger too long, and they’d end up fucking each other to sleep, as quiet as they could manage; legs entwined, close and covert, giddy hands clamped over moaning mouths.
Seth lay on top of her, after, in the starlit dark, his face pressed against her heartbeat, her heavy hands running slowly up and down his spine.
“How long’d it take you?” he asked.
“You worried?” She furrowed her brow. “Couldn’tve been more than three minutes. Was I not obvious?”
“To find your Darkness,” he said.
“Aha.” Her fingers drummed at his lower back. “Bit of an outlier. I got upset about something and my head fell off. First day.”
“What’d you get upset about?”
“Ahh, sure you know yourself. The whole situation.” She blew a dismissive breath into his hair. “Back when I thought this was a curse.”
He shot her a skeptical look from between her tits. “You thought it was a curse, like, two weeks ago.”
“A lot’s happened since then.” She squirmed as he kissed along her breast, to its humid underside. “Seth. I’m sweaty down there.”
“Mmhmm.” He took a deep breath. “You know you have a mole down here? On your ribs?”
“I do?”
“Yeah. Right—” He kissed it. “There.”
“That tickles, you wee bastard.”
“What, this?”
A few cackling minutes later, a truce was called, and Annalise allowed him back into her arms. “It’ll be magnificent, my love,” she whispered. “Whatever your Darkness is. It’ll be so wonderful.”
He felt a happy exhaustion press him further into his lover’s mighty embrace. “Yeah?”
“It follows you, y’know.” Her voice vibrated against his cheek, lulling him further into comfort. “Through the Wheel. It’s your soul’s Darkness, not your body’s. It has something to do with your wants. Ofelia wants to know the truth of everyone. Tiago wants to escape his limited perspective and see the whole picture. I wanted, I don’t know. The chance to be someone else, and live some other way, I guess.”
He snuggled deeper into the crook of her arm and placed her hand on the side of his neck. “This way,” he mumbled, two-thirds awake.
“That’s right,” she whispered. “This way.”
“Mmm.”
“So if you wanna find your Darkness, I guess the question is what do you want?”
He was too adrift now to reply with words. He just wrapped himself tighter around her and hummed.
She laughed, gently. “Me, too,” she whispered, and the last thing he felt before sleep took him was her thick lips pressing against his forehead.
High above their heads the dome of the Deathspell curved into the horizon, encompassing the continent with its green and constant glow. Outside its borders, the fallen world swarmed with seraphim, an infinite gnashing planet of teeth and claws and death battering and breaking itself over and over against life’s final magical bulwark.
And as the year’s end approached, the gibbering eldritch tide thickened and sought any fault-line it could. And as the Legion Verdugos killed their way north, they raced against the Deathspell’s flickering, to bring the Sorcerer-General the two-thousandfold sacrifices required to bolster it for another harrowing year. And as Winter crept forth, the nights were getting colder and colder.
But Seth was in Annalise al Ydris’s arms tonight, and it was quiet, and he was warm.
End of Volume 1