Chapter 20: Bearings

“It is best to count one’s fingers after shaking hands with Praesi.”
– Queen Rowena Alban of Callow

I’d never gotten the full story behind that scarf. Indrani almost never took it off, with the notable exception of when she was naked and otherwise occupied, and she’d been evasive about it when I’d asked. The weave was unusual, finer and tighter than I’d ever seen of Callowan cloth, but save for that there was nothing exceptional about the grey and green scarf. It was from Mercantis, she’d said, and a gift from the Ranger. The first thing she’d ever owned. Aside from those bare bones Indrani had never spoken a word of the matter and I knew better than to push. I was not without little pieces of my own, stolen moments and memories I would rather not have put under the scrutiny of another no matter how dear to me they were. Worn as the cloth was, it seemed one of the few possessions Archer actually cared for along with her monster of a longbow. That she was a wanderer to the bone was plain enough to see, standing before me with the sum of her earthly belongings as she was. Blades, bow, a leather satchel and the clothes on her back. She neither needed nor particularly wanted more than that. A strange thought, to me. I’d not acquired a taste for luxury even after taking the crown, but having a place of my own – a home – and some comforts in it had always seemed natural. Something everyone would want.

I supposed I’d just have to make those rooms a little larger, for whenever my vagrant of a friend came back.

“Snow’s crisp,” Indrani said. “Wind’s calm. Good night for a stroll.”

“I’d tell you to be careful,” I said, “but somehow I don’t see that happening.”

Tugging down her scarf to flash an admittedly roguish smile, Archer winked at me. This was not, I decided, in the least reassuring.

“I’ll be the very soul of prudence,” she lied.

Leaving me to stand leaning on my staff, she quickly darted across the snow to take Hakram’s shoulder in hand. Half a hug, a rough display of affection.

“Keep an eye on them, Hakram,” she said, without a hint of irony. “You know how careless they get without me around to chaperone.”

Adjutant leaned down to gently knock his forehead against her own. Neck angled a little to the side, I noted, as to allow for Indrani to rip open his throat with her fangs were she an orc. A display of trust and kinship, the kind orcs usually reserved for their close family.

“If you die, I’ve staked a claim on your bow,” he told her.

That startled a laugh out of her, along with jeering about how he was supposed to shoot anything when he kept dropping hands all over the place. Akua was standing a little to the side of them, high-collared dress of pale and gold sweeping down to her feet. For all the apparent slenderness of the cloth, she was unaffected by the chill of the night. Indrani clapped her shoulder amicably, which the shade allowed with a fondly tolerant smile.

“You know, since I’m leaving-” Archer began.

Diabolist sighed.

“Fine,” she conceded. “Look your fill.”

Indrani’s brow rose in surprise, then she grinned eagerly. Did I even want to know? A heartbeat passed, and Akua did not move.

“You’re still wearing clothes,” Archer pointed out, sounding a little cheated.

“According to certain interpretations of Trismegistan theory, I am in fact naked at all times,” the shade drily replied.

“Praesi treachery,” Indrani cursed.

Adjutant’s silhouette loomed tall at my side, the orc calmly studying the scene. Lingering on the smile that came easy to Archer’s lips, the almost mellow way Diabolist stood even when so close to her. The last time he’d seen the two of them together, I thought, Indrani had suggested firing arrows at Akua for sport. Before the Everdark, I thought, but that was only part of it. Before Great Strycht, in truth, and the choices made there. Hakram had not been part of those dark hours, and might not understand the ties they had forged. Vivienne, I considered, almost certainly would not. The musings were set aside when Archer finished her usual ritual of taunts and insults with Diabolist, nonchalantly returning to me. She hesitated and I went rifling through my cloak, fingers emerging tightened around a silver flask I tossed at her. Nimbly snatching it out of the air, she cocked an eyebrow at me.

“Iserran brandy,” I lied.

It was, in fact, the foulest-tasting belt of drow senna I’d been able to get my hands on. Hopefully she’d choke on the muddy taste of the mushroom-made liquor while expecting a smooth Proceran distillate. That ought to teach her covers were not to be hogged when it was this cold out and your queen was very much mortal again.

“But I didn’t get you anything,” she pouted, putting away the flask even as she did.

“That’s quite-”

I could have struggled and perhaps even blocked her, but when she put a hand on my waist and dipped me backwards I decided to allow Indrani her way. The kiss was rough, though in a way she knew I liked, and the warmth of her was stirring.

“There,” she said, after withdrawing.

I coughed to hide my breath was a little uneven.

“There,” I very eloquently agreed.

Her hand remained on my shoulder and she met my eyes, this time with serious mien.

“I’ll find him, Cat,” Indrani said. “Bring him home in one piece.”

I nodded, just as serious.

“If one of us can, it’s you,” I replied. “I’ll be expecting the both of you back.”

“You’ve gotten so demanding since they put a crown on your head,” Indrani snorted.

This time we parted for good, and with a casual wave of the hand at all of us she began her trek into the snow. Under the last sliver of the warning moon I watched her leave to recover Masego. Hakram and Akua came to stand at my sides, flanking me in shared silence until finally I breathed out.

“Come on,” I said. “Adjutant, I want to show you something.”

I glanced at Diabolist, who nodded back. Good, it was about time I had a close look at the well I’d charged her to gather.

—

I could feel the slow, constant pulse of the Night even from over fifty feet away.

Akua had put up comprehensive layers of wards around the tent, but that much accumulated power could never be entirely hidden. To me, who stood First Under the Night, it was like feeling a warm whisper of wind against my skin. Diabolist’s eyes looked brighter, her body more… tangible the closer we came, but it was Hakram’s reaction that interested me. He was the only one of the three of us who truly still bore a Name, after all. I could see in the way he straightened his back and free his hand from encumbrance that he was feeling something, at least. He met my gaze uneasily.

“There’s a scent in the air,” he gravelled. “Like coolness and dark.”

“Sharp nose,” Diabolist said, and she ushered us into her workshop.

I’d only been in here once before, at the start, and when the well had barely even taken shape. This was rather more advanced, I thought. Field conditions were no friend to the kind of precision work mages of Akua and Masego’s favoured at the exclusion of almost all else, but Diabolist had made do on the road. The ground beneath the tent was bereft of snow and had been glassed by a Mighty’s flame to be perfectly level. The shade glared at us when we entered until we rid our boots of the worst of the snow, and she went through a pack to retrieve cloths for us to wipe them entirely clean afterwards. Akua herself almost danced to the side of the artefact she was constructing, steps light and elated like a girl at her first summer fair. Adjutant’s eyes remained peeled on the well for a long moment, until he let out a shuddering breath.

“What,” he said, “exactly is that?”

“Our answer to the Grey Pilgrim,” I said.

In a sardonic bit of humour Akua had actually built it to look like a wishing well, though one held up above the floor by four curved supports of lead. Lead, I had learned from my recent studies, held strong properties of stability and grounding if never touched by fire. Held up by those supports was a disc of polished onyx, and from that bottom rose the shape of a well. Shards of obsidian bound together by thin strands of copper – there was, allegedly, no better metal for bridging – made up a glittering octagon, though several large swaths of the side were still empty. Above the well itself, two slender pillars of amethyst-studded copper held up a quaint little angled roof. The roof itself was made of the same obsidian-and-copper assembly as the well, though compared to the octagon the progress made in filling it was farther along. Unsurprising: every shard from the well contained the full exertion of a Mighty’s Night from dusk till dawn, but the roof held only the same by sigil-holders.

“At this pace, the main body will be finished within seven nights,” Diabolist said. “The upper receptacles-”

“Roof,” I drily said. “She means roof.”

“- will take within twenty to thirty nights,” she finished, as if I had never spoken. “Though the artefact itself will be functional after the upper receptacles are half-filled, which will be achieved two dawns from now.”

“Won’t be as strong, though,” I said.

“Which would only be an issue if you meant to directly oppose a foe’s miracles,” Akua said.

Hakram stepped forward hesitantly, boots crisply sounding against the floor. He leaned over the roof, thickly-ridged brow knotting.

“I recognize some of this,” he said. “Praesi sorcery.”

Diabolist let out a pleased little noise.

“Indeed,” she said. “The underlying structure is Trismegistan, of course, though I required some… consultation with Sve Noc before I could properly account for the properties of the Night.”

“And what does it do?” Adjutant asked.

I began moving forward, then suddenly stopped. My staff had begun to pulse, the Night I had woven within beckoned by Akua’s much more complex creation. Unwilling to risk the power still sleeping inside, I propped it up against the side of the tent and limped forward instead. Hakram extended an arm without a word, and I gratefully leaned on it. Fingers tracing the obsidian of the roof, I drew his attention to three symbols in Crepuscular carved on the frame. They reappeared in the patterns, over and over again.

“Years ago, when we were still kids playing war games in the Tower’s shadow, I had a talk with Kilian,” I said. “I told her that Juniper was actually predictable, in a way, because if she had all the information she nearly always made the right choice.”

I smiled, almost melancholy at the memory of those simpler days.

“Presumptuous of me to say, as she proved in swift order, but I learned to temper the principle,” I said. “But for this? Oh, I know how they’re going to swing at us. They tipped their hand at the Battle of the Camps, Hakram. They have one tool that could really cripple us, so it’s a near-certainty it’ll be used.”

“And so you prepared an answer,” Adjutant said.

I ran my thumb against the three symbols. One did not need to know Crepuscular, to glimpse their meaning, for the written language of the drow could sometimes be of obvious meanings. The sun rampant, the sun halved, the sun veiled.

“So we prepared an answer,” I softly agreed.

We left Akua to her toil, after that, filling a well I hoped would not be needed. Yet, as with the sword I had been leaning on in the shape of a staff, I was not certain I would have a choice.

Waste of wastes, but what else could I do?

—

Marching across Iserre with an army of near seventy thousand, even if fifty thousand of those were drow, was not a quick or quiet affair. The Fourth and Third had been put through twin ringers of constant pursuit and assault, and to be frank both had been reaching the end of their rope. Yet I couldn’t afford to slacken our march, either, as drow scouts began reporting that the Levantine army we’d fought the vanguard of at Sarcella was on our tail. Still more than a week behind us, but the reason for that delay became clear when reports of banners not of the Dominion emerged: they’d had Principate reinforcements. Either southern levies hastily put together, or more dangerously the border army of twenty-thousand the First Prince had garrisoned in Tenerife to discourage incursion by the League. Which meant Kairos and his allies had let the lot of them through, because they shouldn’t have had the strength to push back a determined League force. If it truly was Hasenbach’s southern army, that was bad news indeed. Those would be professional soldiers, in majority, that the First Prince had judged would be able to either slow or turn back an invasion by the entire League of Free Cities. They wouldn’t be pushovers, or peasants with spears.

The forced halt of several hours every dawn further complicated our advance, as it needed to be compensated for by marching after nightfall if we didn’t want to lose almost a third of the day’s march. The Firstborn significantly quickened after dusk, of course, but my legionaries most definitely did not. The disjointed peaks made planning awkward, especially as I was wary of simply sending a significant drow force ahead: we were headed into contested grounds, now. A force of five thousand Firstborn caught just after dawn by Levantine or Proceran cavalry would be severely bled, and sending a legionary escort with them would defeat the entire purpose of the exercise. There was no obvious fix to the issue, and none of my three current generals – Abigail, Bagram, Rumena – suggested a feasible alternative. We’d just have to awkwardly force our way forward as fast as we could, hoping we’d get to Juniper before the opposition did.

It was a mere six days after the Fourth was brought back into the fold that we ran into our first enemy outriders.

“Proceran,” General Bagram opined. “Alamans, at a guess. The Arlesites tend to carry javelins.”

Adjutant grunted in agreement. The Fourth had taken the front, today, so it was them who’d sent for me when riders were seen on the horizon. The two of them were on foot, which given that I was seated atop Zombie meant for once I towered taller than either of them.

“That’s at least sixty horsemen,” I noted, shielding my eyes from the sun with my hand. “Screening company, you think?”

“Seems likely,” Bagram said. “Finally good news, eh?”

I nodded thoughtfully. The riders were to our northwest, and if they’d been sent there to watch four our advance it meant we were getting close to Juniper’s position. It also meant, though, that the northern armies of the Dominion and Procer were close enough to the Hellhound that were keeping an eye out for sudden reinforcements to her position. So we’re not the only ones at your gate, Juniper, I thought.

“No point in sending foot after them,” Adjutant said. “They’d be long gone by the time any legionary got there.”

“So we don’t send legionaries,” I replied. “One of you get a message to General Rumena, I want the Losara Sigil to send a warband in pursuit immediately.”

“Even light foot won’t catch up to horse,” General Bagram told me as delicately as an orc could, which wasn’t very.

I forced down the sharp swell of irritation.

“No, General Bagram, during the day it will not,” I flatly said. “Should the horsemen rest at night, however, the Firstborn might very well catch them by surprise if they begin pursuing right now.”

I must not have hidden my annoyance completely, because Bagram saluted and promptly volunteered to speak with Rumena himself. He wasn’t a bad commander, I knew. More experienced than any of my Rat Company officers, he’d been the second of General Istrid for decades and effectively run her general staff while she fought on the frontlines. But he wasn’t one of mine: he was one of Black’s people, in some deep manner. From Black’s crop of soldiers shaped by my teacher’s own decades of war. Bagram would not trust my judgement the way Juniper or Nauk would have. I was, in his eyes, still very much the Carrion’s Lord apprentice. A promising successor but not my teacher’s equal.

“The temper’s back, at least,” Hakram amusedly said.

I glared at him.

“He might as well have called me an idiot,” I retorted.

“He’s fresh to your service,” Adjutant said. “And a hint of fang will be good for your relationship. Bagram was second to Istrid Knightsbane, a hard look won’t offend him.”

I grunted, somewhat mollified.

“It’s better now,” Adjutant pensively said. “When your hackles go up, it’s still you. Not Winter hunger with a Foundling shape to it.”

I glanced away.

“That was me too, Hakram,” I said. “Just with large enough a hammer everything looked like a nail.”

“It was you on a dark day that never quite passed,” the orc disagreed, head shaking in slight disagreement. “And whispers in your ear. You handled it better than most would have, but the marks were there.”

“You never said anything,” I frowned.

“You were drinking aragh like water, at the start,” Hakram said. “But you got it under control after some prodding. That meant you weren’t frozen, just slowed. I was willing to wait.”

My fingers clenched.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have,” I said.

“It didn’t make you worse, Catherine,” Adjutant said. “Jagged edges, true, but those weren’t sunny days. Jagged kept a lot of people breathing.”

“Killed just as many,” I said.

Adjutant turned to me, the glare of the sun casting shadows like scar across his leathery face. The dark, deep-set eyes were as serene as I’d always known them to be.

“You did what needed doing,” Hakram Deadhand said. “It wasn’t all pretty, and most won’t thank you for it. But you kept Callow standing until it could stand, and even with Winter in your soul it was a peace you strove for.”

He bared a thin stripe of ivory fangs, chidingly.

“It’s a gentle sort of tyranny, by my reckoning, that you would name the worst of you,” he said.

I released the grip on my reins, slowly.

“It’s a little uncanny, sometimes,” I said. “The way you always know what to say.”

His fangs clicked amusedly.

“That is who we are,” Adjutant simply said.

I stroked Zombie’s mane and spurred her slightly, enough that she danced to the side and my leg grazed his side. We stayed there for a while, watching the riders on the horizon, until he spoke up again.

“So,” he said. “Archer?”

I cocked my head to the side.

“I know there’s a risk in sending her after Masego when there’s heroes on the prowl, to the both of us, but-”

“You are letting her leave to return with a victory,” Hakram interrupted in a rumbling voice, “and sending a trusted and powerful Named after what could be a disastrous trouble. I’m well aware, Cat. As you are that I wasn’t asking about that at all.”

I cleared my throat.

“Surprised you waited this long to ask,” I said.

“Wasn’t entirely sure until the farewell display,” the orc admitted. “You two have always been…”

Yeah, he didn’t really need to elaborate on that. For both our sakes, really.

“It’s a thing,” I said. “That is happening. On occasion.”

“But not,” Hakram said, “too frequently?”

“We’re not involved, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said.

“Ah,” he hummed. “Unusual, for you.”

He didn’t ask the question, only leaving the door open to elaborate if I felt like it. Gods, I’d missed him.

“I’m in the middle of a continent-wide war,” I eventually said. “Romance isn’t exactly a priority.”

“But,” Hakram said.

“Might be something I want eventually,” I shrugged. “Won’t be anytime soon, or with her. We know where we stand, and regardless there’s the… Masego situation.”

“That’s been hard to get a read on,” the orc said.

“Like watching denial and obliviousness waltz,” I snorted. “Though I have to wonder how much of those there really are, when it comes down to it.”

Masego had his habits, but he wasn’t exactly blind. Mostly he missed cues, or misread the reasons for things – I suspected his upbringing hadn’t helped, both because of the men who’d raised him and the environment they’d raised him in. I could hardly think of a more terrifyingly frustrating place for a boy who’d had difficulty understanding others than Praesi aristocratic circles. When it came to the Woe he tended to catch onto things fairly well, and ask when he thought he was missing something. And he’d asked me to take care of Indrani before leaving for Thalassina, noting her to be upset. As for Indrani, well, what she said and what she thought weren’t always the same thing. Especially when it came to what she considered shamefully soft attachments, like admitting she loved people who loved her. Fucking Ranger, I uncharitably thought.

“I don’t think it would be an issue if we kept doing this after we’re all back together,” I finally added.

Hakram bowed his head in agreement.

“Tell me you’re not sleeping with the other one, at least,” he gravelled.

I choked.

“Akua?” I protested. “Gods no. I mean, don’t get me wrong, just look at her-”

“You often do,” the orc said. “Though I don’t see the appeal, to be honest. She’s dangerous, I suppose, but all soft and fleshy.”

“Those can, uh, be good things,” I muttered. “But she’s still Akua, Hakram.”

“I am aware,” Adjutant said. “But I wonder if that means the same thing it used to, Cat. For you, at least, and perhaps Indrani.”

“This the softer predecessor of the crucible Vivienne is going to put me through?” I said, a tad sharply.

The orc shook his head.

“I wasn’t down there,” he said. “You will have reasons for this, though you haven’t shared them. I want to know where we stand with her, that’s all.”

Silence reigned, for a long moment.

“I am no longer bound by the oath to kill her,” I acknowledged.

“But,” Hakram said.

“One hundred thousand souls,” I said. “There has to be a price for that.”

He slowly nodded.

“Until then, she is to be Akua,” the orc murmured. “Not the Doom of Liesse.”

I did not reply. I did not need to.

—

Before dawn, Ivah came back with four survivors from the Proceran outriders. We were two days’ march away from Juniper, which was pleasing.

The enemy had beaten us there, which was not.