Seth’s hand tightened at the wooden haft. He hissed air out and slammed the edge home, point-first.
He planted his foot on the shovelhead and stomped it the rest of the way into the rootpacked dirt. The crunchy shifting noise joined the chorus of shoveling soldiers all across the field, their silhouettes growing sharper against the pine-needle sky as the sun lurked below the horizon.
Before their heroic final stand against the abominations from beyond the deathspell, it turned out, the village of Shaheill had a lot of digging to do.
From the north gate, yellow-ribboned volunteers carted freshly felled logs and sharpened them to points with the clopping of axes. Further out, by the trenches that were already finished, Ofelia directed the traffic of wheelbarrows loaded with earth and sod to cover the boards they’d laden over the pit traps.
The coverings were thick enough to easily hold a human’s weight, Seth knew. The blackfeather’s bulk would smash through them, though, and send a limb toppling into a pit of timber spikes. It seemed brilliant to Seth, and the quantities of sweat they were shedding was surely dear enough that the al Ydrises wouldn’t have directed this activity as some plot to get everyone’s mind out of the dull, spreading dread left by each elapsing hour.
But Tiago, where he stood atop the village’s palisade, was frowning.
Seth staked his shovel vertical into the ground and waggled his tin canteen. Its thin, hollow slosh sent him to the spigot at the edge of the field they were carving. He passed the vicer, Simon al Teremi, who had been charged with going door-to-door seeking able-bodied cowards and was corralling one now with gentle mercilessness.
“Take the cloth, Ochoa.”
“I can’t—I’ve never even—I’ve only drilled, ever.”
“You have me beat then, goodman. My last muster day was a decade ago and I scheduled a meeting that day to get out of it.” Simon lifted the pale man’s arm and tied the badge to his bicep. “Look, this is the easiest bit. It’ll be beat to shit by the time it’s our turn. All they’re asking of us is to be brave. Just do whatever that scary porcelain doll girl tells you to do.”
Ochoa looked to Ofelia, who was handing out her own stock of assignments, and it was lucky timing, because Simon’s hands were shaking so badly it took him an extra try to tie the cloth off.
Seth topped his canteen up and approached. “I’ll take one of those. Go Team Red. Rah-rah.”
Simon glanced at him as Ochoa shuffled away. “You’re one of the Verdugo’s sons?”
“I’m Seth,” said Seth. “And I’m here for a cloth and a pointed stick.”
Simon chuckled. “Here we are, then, Seth. No pointed stick quite yet, but we’ll love this enthusiasm when it comes time.”
Ofelia stared at the cloth, as Simon handed it off to Seth and Seth tied it to his wrist. “You’re really doing this.”
Seth’s forearm, thin as it was, required a double-bind to secure the fabric. “You don’t need to sound so surprised.”
“I don’t sound like anything,” Ofelia said. “I work very prudently to be as monotone as possible, for the sake of my aesthetic.”
“Well, yes. I am really doing this.”
“It’s a bitter waste of your value if you die, Mr. il Gutierre,” Ofelia said. “Rather like placing a splendid mouser in a swimming competition with an eel.”
“That is the craziest fucking metaphor I’ve ever heard, Ms. al Ydris, and it won’t stop me.”
“Oh, you needn’t stop.” Ofelia’s willowy fingers brushed the knot he’d tied to himself. “Just don’t die, yes?”
“Sure.”
“Good.” Ofelia smiled vaguely. “I would miss you very much.”
“Feeli!” Tiago was descending the palisade. He waved his arms at her. “They found the sorcerer!”
“Ah, Saints.” Ofelia broke into a jog back toward the clustered village streets. “Come on, Seth.”
By the time they’d arrived at the sorcerer’s house—a bungalow that ought to be quite pretty, with dried vines tangling its window and peeling paint on the door—a crowd had gathered. At its fore stood Anna al Ydris, her goliath arms crossed. Little redheaded Riccana and two fellow hermandati were tugging a stubbly, threadbare man out of its darkened interior. “Goodman, come on. Please just see her.”
The sorcerer staggered out the rest of the way, swatting the hands that bore him like they were insects landing on his shoulders. “Off me. Off me, damn you all. I’m going.”
“You’re the Shaheill sorcerer,” Anna said. “Robert il Magnard.”
“Yes. I am a sorcerer, yes.” The man’s bloodshot eyes clambered up Anna then dropped back down to her boots. “Worst fucking thing that ever happened to me.”
Anna’s stone face showed little pity. “Your Legion is calling you again to serve, Robert.”
“I’m not fit,” he mumbled.
“Stand up. Stop muttering.”
Robert made a credible effort at both. “Said I’m not fit, Madam Verdugo. I’ve got a hangover.”
“You won’t, by the time you’re needed.”
“By the time I’m needed I intend to be drunk, Madam Verdugo.” Robert laughed, high and cracked; he sounded like a gamefowl getting run over. “I can’t do it. I can’t. I can’t look at it, I can’t fight it, I can’t do a thing. Cut my fucking head off and be done.”
Anna looked about ready to do just that. Tiago intervened from past the great black scabbard on her back. “Have you forgotten the spell?”
“Have I forgotten. Got your fucking fancy ink crawling around all over your fancy arm and you think you know how magic works. I haven’t fucking forgotten the spell, boy. I dream the spell. I’ll forget my father’s name before I forget the spell. It’s everywhere. Over everything. Like looking at the sun too long. They brand it to the inside of your skull.”
“Don’t be pathetic, il Magnard.” Anna’s murani fangs were showing now. “You’ve got a pension and a house so that the Legion can depend on you for these situations.”
“Aye, a pension. A pension and a jumpy neighbor who pretends he’s not being paid threebrace a day to blow my brains out if I hold my hands out wrong. A pension and a head full of—” Robert’s poeticism tripped over his enlarged liver. “Of shit. Shit and blood.”
“If you won’t serve for the Legion,” Tiago said, “then you—”
“You made a match out of me!” Robert spat a discolored lob into the dirt at Tiago’s feet. “And now you want me normal? To eat three squares and tiddly-um down to the shops and go hmmm I wonder what’s at market today? You expect me to hold a lover with these? A child? A fucking job? A fucking life? When all I have to do is—”
His hands shot up and forward. A ringing out of screams and shouts. Tiago ducked, lunged, slide tackled the man to the ground, and wrenched those gnarled weapon-hands behind Robert’s back.
“See?” Robert’s cracked cry was suspended halfway between laughter and weeping. “See? Let me up. Let me saintsfucking up, boy.” He struggled to his feet, though Tiago stayed at his back, still pinning his arms. “You ruined me. You colorless bastards. You made a match out of me and you sent me home to a paper world, and I’m still burning.”
Tears cut through the grime on his face.
“I’m still burning,” he sobbed. “What the fuck do I do?”
“We can’t put him out there, mother.” Ofelia led the al Ydrises (and Seth, who was tiring of being and Seth) to the muster yard, where the wagons from Tondarre were unloading men and materiel. “He’s a tripwire. There’s no using him.”
“I fucking know that, girl.” Anna spared a common glare for Feeli, a rare target. “That’s two or three fireballs down.”
“Two,” Tiago the optimist said. “Man looked too sallow to squeeze out a third for us.”
Anna stopped in her tracks at the muster yard gate, staring at Tondarre’s meager dozen who were stowing their road cloaks and weapons onto the pile. “This is the garrison from Tondarre? This is it?”
Riccana held a message printed beneath a United Territories letterhead, the Legion’s phoenix feather emblem split in half on its seal. “The Corregidor’s office sent as many as were possible.”
“Of course he did.” Anna hacked an acrid laugh. “That bundled-up bedwetter needed half his men to wipe his ass and check under his bed for unlit. They have any sorcerers in Tondarre?”
“Not since last year, apparently,” Riccana said. “The man moved further south to be with family. The sorceress from Lam’s Hob is here. She passed her fire test.”
Ofelia, who’d been put in charge of gathering and testing the sorcerers, leaned into her mother’s pointed ear. “On the third try.”
Anna scoffed. “That little stripling’s never seen a seraph that wasn’t in Saint Selene and the Naughty Bugleboy.”
Seth knew that book; it was one of the ones he’d stolen when he taught himself to read. The seraph on the page had looked like a goat stapled to another goat and had given him nightmares for a while.
Anna turned from the concerned blue eyes of their their counterfeit Chief Hermandat. Her habitually slouchy shoulders slouched further. “It’s not adding up,” she whispered. “It’s not. It—”
With a burst of energy she departed the yard, leaving her retinue in uneasy silence.
“I suppose I’ll go see our stripling sorceress,” Ofelia said. “She’ll be fine for a fireball or two.”
“Will that be enough?”
“We’ll get more,” Ofelia said. “We’ve hours to go. Mother’s just mothering.”
Tiago said nothing.
“I’m gonna…” Seth hesitated. “Maybe I should talk to her.”
“Bad idea,” Tiago said.
“Do we have room for good ideas tonight?”
“Guess not.”
Seth followed Anna to where she stood, huddled, staring down a darkened street as early-riser candles and mitelamps sent pinprick lights into the pre-dawn. He approached the Verdugo with the slow care he’d give a wounded bull.
She snapped around, eyes burning stars. “Get the fuck back, il Gutierre. I told you.”
“I’m staying back,” Seth said. The simmering animosity on Anna’s face, as intimidating as it was, certainly beat the blank defeat she’d worn in the muster yard. He needled, just a little: “No way this is ten feet. You’re not so good at judging distances when you’re Anna, I think.”
“What’s that on your arm?”
“What, this?” Seth looked at the red team signifier like he’d only just noticed it. “I’m putting myself to use.”
“Like fuck you are. Give that spear to someone who’ll use it right and find a place to bunker down.”
“You and your children are facing this thing head-on. I am, too.”
“I told you.” She was closing in on him. Closer than that ten-foot rule, surely. “You’re. Not. Strong enough.”
“You’re sending hay balers and pensioners out there. You know what I can do.” Seth was using that voice again, he realized. The one she said was so obnoxious. “You called me a millstone around your neck. You called me weak. Fine. But don’t call me a coward when you know that’s not true, Anna. I’m a preener, sometimes, but this isn’t preening. The shit that we’ve faced—that you’ve shown me how to face—I’m still weak, and still a burden, maybe. But I’m not a coward anymore.”
“Okay. You’ve made your point. Stop wasting my time and take that off.”
“No.”
“Give me that cloth, Seth il Gutierre.”
“No.”
“You give me that fucking—”
She reached for the red cloth. He snatched it away. A dangerous, wild look lit into her face and she seized his arm, and without thinking he shoved her back, and he might as well have been shoving the side of a barn—
But she stumbled. Back away from him. As if he were twice as strong as he actually was. They stared at one another, and Anna’s perpetually squinty eyes were huge and blinking with rapid confusion. Her ears lay flat.
Then the moment passed and she stomped back into his face. “You don’t refuse my orders, thief.”
“Tell me why,” he said. “Tell me the real reason why and maybe I’ll go hide like you’re asking me to.”
“Fuck you. I don’t know what the fuck you want from me. If this is because I said you weren’t strong—”
“This is because I just found a family and now I want to help keep them alive,” Seth said. “But if you’re honest with me—”
“Honest with you about what?”
“Just say you love me and you’re worried about me, and I’ll hide. I’ll do whatever you want me to.”
“If you go and get your skinny ass killed, then Annalise will—”
“You, Anna. You say it, and I’ll go be the coward you’re pretending I still am.”
“Do you think I like being this?” Anna raked her fingers against her heavy black gambeson. “This evil asshole? I fucking hate being Anna. I want to rip my own fucking head off. It was barely tolerable before your whiny little ass showed up and now it’s torture. So please, Seth, if please is what you want to hear, please just take the fucking cloth off and go be safe somewhere and stay out of my sight until I can be the woman you love again.”
“You’re the woman I love right this second.”
“Then please.” Her voice was suddenly so small and unsure. “I can’t. I can’t be like this, when I’m her. I can’t think about how smashed-up Anna is. It’s like when you look at the wound and realize how bad it hurts. I can’t be a person.”
Anna’s not for winning over. She’s a big arsehole cudgel I bash seraphs with. She’s the bits of me I don’t enjoy being. Don’t worry about Anna. She isn’t good for us.
He unwrapped the cloth from his arm and held it out to her. The spiky vitality returned to her; she snatched it from his hand. “Now get the fuck off my wall,” she said. “You want to be useful, you go to the inroad by the square, and you keep a tally of how many more bodies we get.”
“All right,” Seth said. “I see any sorcerers, I’ll send them your way.”
“Good,” she said, and then, like it was an afterthought, “You’re not a coward. That’s true.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re rash.”
“I’ll take that,” Seth said, and left her there in the slowly brightening street.
He arrived at Shaheill’s outskirts and exchanged brief words with the clerk at its signpost, who left him her clipboard and departed for her bed with some relief. He didn’t realize how tired he was until the slivering sun peered pryingly above the treetops on the other side of the road. He wasn’t sure how long he stood; he might have microslept between his blinks. He was beginning to consider a catnap slumped against Shaheill’s road sign when a horse and its attendant cloud of dust crested a far hill.
Seth gave his own face a light cuff and tried not to slouch. He traced the horse’s approach and then hit himself again, harder this time, to ensure he was not dreaming.
The horse had a lizard on top of it.
Seth blinked and wiped his eyes. The lizard was still there.
The lizard slowed their ride before Seth and leaned forward in its saddle. Beneath a draping riding cloak of heavy felt, it was unclothed, but lizards usually are, Seth supposed, even if they tend not to bipedalism or equestrianism, for that matter. There was nothing untoward to see on its cream-scaled belly regardless.
“I greet you,” it said, in an unexpectedly smooth and pleasant voice. “I am the Blue Ekadao.”
“Hello,” Seth said, and decided not to point out that the Blue Ekadao was copper-colored, mostly, with bits of green on its forelegs. “I’m Seth il Gutierre. Welcome to sunny Shaheill.”
The Blue Ekadao reached into—his? her? their?—saddlebag and produced a sheaf of papers crowned by the same pink card that had guided the al Ydris clan to Shaheill’s gates. “I received a skywire requiring my presence in Shaheill. I bring my papers and a stamped dictum that I am a Sorcerer Subofficiyant of the Legion, trained in the siege spell. I trust this will ensure remuneration for my time.”
“Yeah,” Seth said. “Probably.”
“Splendid.” The Blue Ekadao climbed from their saddle, tail straight out for balance. “Then I am at your command.”
Seth took her horse’s tether. The beast seemed skittish, and relieved to be rid of its rider. “You’re a sarkanian, aren’t you?”
“I have been told so by those who would know,” the Blue Ekadao said. “And I see no reason they’d lie.”
“You know you’re the first sarkanian I ever met?”
“This is often the case.” Their face did not move the way a mammal’s would. It wore the same toothy grin it had the entire time. “I will tell you then that I am a male sarkanian. I imagine you were wondering. There are very few of us—ten times fewer than our sisters. You are triply blessed this morning. Your first sarkanian, your first sarkanian man, and an accomplished sorcerer.”
“Yes. That is extremely a blessing.” Seth scanned the area by the roadside for an al Ydris or an il Teremi to hand this conversation off to, and came up blank. Just fellow humans, gawking at the unlit and the reptile. “Honestly, you’ve come at the perfect time.”
“I must also tell you that I do not like how humans smell most of the time,” the Blue Ekadao said. “So please keep your distance if possible.”
“Oh.” Seth backed up. “Uh, sorry.”
“It is not your fault. My kind speak through scent as strongly as through words, and humans are incapable of modulating their bouquet. Unless they’ve bathed recently, humans smell deeply offended. Constantly.” He made a chittering noise. “It certainly brings a touch of awkwardness to our communications, no? That was a laugh.”
Seth laughed as well, though this conversation would be feeling awkward if he smelled like poise and peonies. “I can see how it might.”
“I have come here to kill a blackfeather, or die to it.” The Blue Ekadao’s clawed feet scraped the cobblestones. “Pray lead me to where I am needed.”
In the square, Simon il Teremi was sitting at the scaffold, face buried in his hands. Riccana was next to him, patting slow circles on his back. “Maybe you could sleep,” she said. “The Verdugo has it in hand, I think.”
“I tried already,” Simon said. “I don’t know if I can. Every minute, every bit of time that’s left, ticking down, I can’t—what if I’d be sleeping through the last time we’ll all see each other? See this place whole.” His red-rimmed gaze departed his palms and fixed uncomprehendingly on Seth and his new friend.
“Who’s this, then?” Riccana asked.
“This is Ekadao,” Seth said. “And he—”
“The Blue Ekadao,” the sorcerer corrected. “This is my honorific, not my name.”
“What’s your name?”
“I must tell you this is a question of great intimacy to the Sarkani,” the Blue Ekadao said. “I would fain reveal it to a lover, but you are difficult to smell.”
“Ekadao.” Simon managed a smile. “Well met. Are you—sorry, Blue Ekadao.”
“The Blue Ekadao.”
“Yes, right.” Simon grasped for his manners. “Every time?”
“If it please you, sir.”
“You’re a sorcerer, then?”
The Blue Ekadao bowed. “I am, sir. And you are Corregidor Alesandri, perhaps?”
“Alesandri’s out,” Simon said. “I’m what we’ve got.”
“That is all right. So am I.” The Blue Ekadao smiled, or maybe he didn’t. “Are you in command?”
“That would be the Verdugo.” Riccana pointed toward the muster yard.
“Splendid,” the Blue Ekadao said, and was walking again. Seth, who was waking further and further from his fugue as this reptilian gentleman dragged him around Shaheill, caught up, making sure not to tread on the Blue Ekadao’s swishing tail.
“How did you learn sorcery?” he asked.
“I was taught the siege-spell by Officiyant Duruth al Mekz, at the Necropolis.” The Blue Ekadao indicated the papers he’d handed Seth. “It’s all there.”
“Right, right. But did you do any magic before then? Like, are you—”
The Blue Ekadao’s reptilian face was a cypher. “By the charter my people have signed with the Legion, I am not required to disclose this, nor would I be in breach of Necropolitan law. The Sarkani Territory asserts plenary authority over—”
“I’m not trying to hit you with any sort of gotcha, all right? I’m asking because… Sarkani stormcallers fill up airships, right?”
“Yes.”
“Could you do that?”
The Blue Ekadao ceased walking; he became very still. A smell like cracked pepper tingled Seth’s nose. “You presume that because I am a sorcerer of the Sarkani I am a stormcaller?”
Seth untied his tongue. “Look, I’m sorry to offend. But we’ve got a goddamn Blackfeather, and I’d hoped—”
“I am a stormcaller,” the Blue Ekadao said, and made that churring laugh noise again. The smell was replaced by something floral and lilting, like lavender. “I am messing with you. Have cheer, Seth il Gutierre. Death is dulcet.”
“Maybe it is,” Seth said. “But I’ve just found the love of my life and she can lift me over her head one-handed, so it better take its time.” He set his jaw. No sleep. Not yet. “And if you’re a stormcaller, I have an incredibly stupid idea.”