Page 15

‘Ah, piss and fire,’ Lotta grumbled. He had been doing the delicate work of keeping Perin’s braid in perfect line with the other rows as he worked the plait around the curve of his skull to the nape.

The style was Usican, warlike, and with Perin’s high cheekbones and proud nose, it made him look like ancient nobility. ‘I’ll have to start that one again.’

Perin waved his fussing away, glaring now at Benjen. ‘Why the fuck did you bring the leg-stabbing traitor?’

Despite being born in Usic, Perin had the strongest northern-Middrenite accent Elo had ever heard, but it had softened over the years.

Some of these people had been Elo’s friends.

A few faces he recognised, but they had all since fallen away when he hung up his sword and left the army.

Lotta had visited him, once or twice, without his husband.

But the third time, Elo had pretended not to be home.

The memory shamed him still. At the time he had felt too broken, too lost, to be at ease with the people from the life he had abandoned. Except for Arren.

At least Lotta seemed only mildly annoyed to see him, compared to Elseber’s horror and Perin’s open disgust. He was Irisian and Talician, with freckled golden-brown skin and coiled hair that he usually wore in thin, tight twists.

He had been born to a wealthy family of seasilk weavers under the protection of House Benin, and been squired to their guard at the age of six, but he wore the king’s colours now.

Benjen shrugged at Perin’s anger. ‘We have more stew than we know what to do with,’ he said.

‘And none of you can bake for shit.’ There were in fact two pots of bubbling broth on the fire, the smaller one filled with mutton and green peppers.

Benjen patted the ground beside him. ‘Sit here, general,’ he said.

The scent of the food reminded Elo so intensely of his mothers’ home that he almost gasped with the pain of it.

He wondered if his mother-still-living, Bahba, had written to him while he was away.

Whether she had received his letter about Yatho and Telle.

If she hated him now he had left her alone for so long.

‘Don’t worry, general,’ said Lotta, unwinding Perin’s braid and beginning again. ‘I have my husband by the strings. He can’t stomp off.’

Perin scowled.

Elo steeled himself and sat down carefully by Benjen, who held out a bottle of oil.

‘You remember how to make mtabga?’ he asked.

What a question. ‘Of course.’ Elo held out his hand and cupped his palm so Benjen could pour a small pool into it, which he rubbed into the pads of his fingers and the lines of his palms, into the sword callouses that had grown fresh again with new use.

Benjen separated the dough into six balls, the size of apples, and between them they began to stretch them out, quick and sure, before their skin drank in the oil.

Elo didn’t need a wood roller when he had the spin and flex of his own hands, carefully not breaking the piece until it was large enough to be a plate.

As they worked, the rest of the group settled back into chatter; whose feet hurt, whose sword-work was shoddy, who was hungry, how many days they thought they had left before they reached the highlands. The peace was shallow, but deepening.

When the first two pieces of dough were ready, Benjen flattened the coals at their side of the fire and they threw on the oiled and flattened bread.

As it crisped and sizzled, Benjen ladled out some of the lamb stew, placing it in the centre of the dough and spreading it with the base of the spoon before Elo could pick up the edges with quick, hot fingers, folding the round into a semicircle that completely covered the meat.

Each crescent rose and ballooned slightly, but Elo pulled out his dagger to press down the edges of the bread and seal it as the undersides cooked.

Then, Benjen set to flipping the stuffed breads as Elo prepared the next ones to go on the coals.

He looked up, realising that the chatter had stopped.

‘You didn’t jest that he could cook,’ said Elseber. The crowd of twenty or so were all staring at them both.

‘That’s all he’s good for,’ said Perin sourly. ‘Cooking and causing trouble.’

‘Is it true you killed Lord Yether?’ said someone whose name Elo had forgotten.

‘No,’ said Elo.

‘The pamphlets say you did.’

‘Don’t believe everything you read,’ said Benjen.

‘Aye,’ Elseber added. ‘Those fools waste a fortune turning good paper into shitcloth.’

‘But you did fight in the Lesscian rebellion, general?’ said another called Ainne.

‘I did.’

‘Why?’

‘Bread’s done,’ said Benjen loudly, sliding the first mtabga off the coals and onto the top of a shield, where he cut it into fragrant pieces.

The others crowded around to take their slices and fill their bowls, the hunger in their bellies rising to silence them.

Elo continued baking, enjoying the simplicity of bread while hoping the distraction would last.

It didn’t.

‘If you fought against the king, why are you a general with us now?’ This was a man called Cilean speaking between bites of steaming bread. In Blenraden he had been a young squire, but now he was broad and bearded. ‘No offence.’

Without Skedi, Elo didn’t have the skill for white lies.

‘We called a truce,’ said Elo, placing the last bread onto the fire for Benjen to fill and turn. ‘The king and I disagree on how people should be ruled, but in the face of invasion we set our differences aside.’

‘How should we be ruled, then?’ said Perin, who was holding up a slice of mtabga to Lotta so he could eat without getting ash on his hands and into the braids. ‘You still banging the drum of the gods?’

Elo felt, rather than saw, a warning glance from Benjen. ‘I still hold that gods have a place in Middren,’ he said anyway. ‘People should be free in their faith.’

‘Even faith for Hseth?’

Elo swallowed. The atmosphere grew dark, tense. Dangerous.

‘Perin, love …’ Lotta warned, but his husband pressed on.

‘They say her priests round up our people if they’re caught. Burn them or kill them as sacrifices. If they can’t find Middrenites, they use their own foot soldiers. And what do you think they summon her for?’

Elo held his tongue. He had read many treatises on war. He knew all of the crimes a person could commit against the world, and each other.

‘They summon her,’ Perin continued, ‘to burn good land, and claim the ashes for their victory. Is that the kind of worship that should be free?’

Elo felt all eyes on him, and sensed the fear in them, the rage. He thought of Kissen; her pain, her scars and fury. Her hatred of the gods. A hatred that, despite it all, he could not hold.

‘Fire has many forms,’ he said at last. ‘The fire before us brings comfort and warmth. Not pain.’ Perin scowled. ‘Our own king, your king, has fire in his heart.’

A few of them settled at that. Did they comprehend what Arren had done?

That he had made deals with gods despite his own laws?

Or did they pretend to themselves that his flame was simply his own godhood, acquired out of some strange magic.

Elo sucked his teeth. ‘All power is dangerous,’ he said.

‘All power should be held in check. Hseth must be stopped.’

That set them all to whispering. Perhaps they even warmed to him. Without a god’s sight, it was difficult to tell.

‘This is nonsense,’ snarled Perin. He leapt to his feet, and Lotta threw up his hands in frustration: another braid ruined.

‘This bastard can’t just turn his coat whenever he feels like it.

He can’t slice through Benjen’s leg and have him dismissed from Blenraden after all we did to win it.

The god-loving rebel should be in stocks, not a general! ’

Elo stood too, slowly, but raised his hands, floury palms forward. If Perin’s anger didn’t pain him, he might have chuckled. To himself, he had been unrelentingly stoic in his pride, certain in his honour, but to all others he was as fickle as the sunshine on an autumn day.

‘You’re not wrong, Sergeant Perin,’ said Elo. ‘But I am here on the king’s orders.’

‘Yet all the army says you turn away the king’s messengers if they come to your door.’

Elo hadn’t realised that his wrestle of pride with Arren had caused gossip.

He tried to fish for the right thing to say, but then the sound of singing stirred them.

It was gentle, this tune, accompanied by harp strings, and the melody of it softened the crackle of the air, and the way Perin’s fingers had twitched closer to his blade.

‘Come. Sit,’ said Lotta to his husband, tugging on his hand. ‘You look ridiculous, your hair half done.’ When Perin didn’t move, he insisted. ‘Please, Per. Between us and Elogast we have shared bread and a shared enemy, that has to be enough.’

‘And shared wine,’ said Elseber, snatching up a skin from the ground beside her and brandishing it out to them. Cilean eyed her with such affront that Elo suspected it was his. ‘Let’s drink!’

The others cheered, the tension broken. For now. Perin made a disgruntled noise in his throat and sat down. Lotta put a hand on the nape of his neck and murmured something soothing.

Elo breathed out, sitting back beside Benjen, who was splitting the last mtabga into two for the both of them.

Elseber was being generous with Cilean’s stash, much to his dismay, but it did the job of keeping people’s hands occupied and away from their blades.

Further away the singers’ tune was being picked up by a few more voices.

Elo caught some of the words: Sacrifice. Breaker. Victory.

‘I shouldn’t have come,’ said Elo. ‘I’m sorry, Benjen.’

Benjen scoffed, and Elo looked at him with surprise.

‘Why do you think I brought you here, Ser Elogast?’ he said. The firelight painted his old squire’s face golden; his jaw was strong, with a ruff of dark beard growing beneath his chin, and he had arched eyebrows that made him look constantly on the edge of reprimand or surprise.

‘May I speak freely?’ he added. ‘General?’

Elo held the warm food in his hands. ‘There’s been too much bread and blood between us for anything else , ’ he said.

Benjen nodded. ‘You are no fool,’ he said.

‘You must have already noticed that this army is barely held together with prayers and fear.’ When Elo’s expression gave his agreement away, Benjen nodded at the others.

‘Even here, we have seen war before, but still we bicker and fight. They are all still deciding who to believe, who to follow, whether it will be worth it. And you … in your pride and your silence, you put it all at risk.’

‘Risk?’ repeated Elo. Gods knew he meant them no harm. He had fought with these knights. He had chosen to fight with them now.

‘People look up to you,’ said Benjen. He rubbed his leg.

‘So did I. I was a scared farmboy and you made me a knight, you told me what glory could look like, what songs are written for. I knew I could follow you and the king anywhere, into the darkest storm, because my faith in you was greater than my fear of anything.’

Elo didn’t know what to say. Benjen had lowered his voice to a whisper, and against the crackle of flames, the sizzle of the stewpot that had been upended onto the coals to clean, no one could hear them.

‘And now people are more afraid than they have ever been,’ said Benjen. ‘They look to people like you, like the king, trying to decide where to put their faith. If you, the Lion of Lesscia, the hero of Blenraden, does not show he believes that the Sunbringer can win, then no one will believe it.’

He didn’t mean Lotta, Perin, Elseber, Ainne, Cilean. He meant all the gathered armies, angry and afraid.

‘My life, my blood, my heart,’ Elo murmured, bitterly.

That was the belief he had drummed into everyone he commanded, everyone he had trained.

After the main armies had fled with the death of Arren’s sister, Elo had known that if he did not build hope in Arren, they would run, and Middren would fall.

They had to be fierce, united, certain, to have any hope at all.

How far Elogast had fallen from that faith. How much remained of the man he had been? He had given it all to Arren, and been betrayed.

‘If people do not believe we can win another God War,’ said Benjen, ‘then they will fall apart at the first breath of Hseth’s flame. And if you don’t help them believe, the king will find someone else. And I trust your leadership more than any stranger who has never seen a battlefield.’

It sounded as if he was speaking about something specific. The singing had come closer now. A group of folk in beribboned white were leading the music, similar to the palest greys and whites of Lesscian archivists, but these people wore ribbons of blue and yellow, and they had leaves in their hair.

‘Oh, trust those pious performers to spoil the wine,’ muttered Elseber. ‘I think they’re coming closer.’

‘They’re not performers,’ said Cilean, snatching back the skin that had made the round back into Elseber’s hands. ‘They’re clerics.’

‘Same difference.’

Clerics? Elo looked towards the singers.

‘Clear the way!’ came a call.

Benjen’s little gathering stood up, laughing and shifting aside so that a drummer in white and a harpist could walk through them.

Behind them came a woman. Her feet were bare, her dirty blonde hair wrapped neatly around her head, pinning in gaudy stag’s antlers.

Her eyes met Elo’s, and he recognised her, even as her mouth twisted in a righteous smirk.

One of Tarin’s murderers. She was free. Elo drew his breath, ready to call for arrest, but then he saw the gold stag-and-sun emblem pinned at her throat.

Something of that grandeur could only have come from the king.

Not only was Benjen right, but perhaps Elo was too late.