The Steel Remains

Perhaps, though—look at it this way, makes a lot of sense if you think about it, man—the dwenda were delayed by simple necessity. Perhaps navigation in the gray places was not the easy matter Seethlaw had made it appear. Perhaps, once in the Aldrain marches, the dwenda must cast about like wolves for spoor of Ringil and his sudden, murderous new friend from the steppes. Perhaps they must find the thin cool scent of the river with painstaking care, and sift it for the place where their prey disembarked. And perhaps even then, with their targets found, the dwenda storm-callers must struggle for position the way a swimmer struggles to hold station against a current.

Could be. Those who managed to live through the battle would nod and shrug, touch old wounds and shiver. Who the fuck knows. Yeah, could be.

Or could be—Ringil would have liked this one—it was politics that held them up, the disorderly individual dissent that he’d seen playing out among the dwenda. Perhaps it took Seethlaw awhile to convince his fellow Aldrain that this was something that needed to be done.

Or perhaps it was the other way around. Perhaps it was Seethlaw who had to be convinced, or at least to convince himself.

And so it went pointlessly on, the theorizing and head shaking and wonder among survivors of the dwenda encounter at Beksanara—or Ibiksinri, to give it the name those who built it would recognize, those who, for political convenience and a treaty not one in a hundred would have been educated well enough to read, were driven away in cold and hunger or simply butchered there in the street.

Ibiksinri, then. Site once again for blades unleashed and blood spilled and screaming across the murderous night. Funny, Ringil might have said, how nothing ever fucking changes.

The dwenda came in the small, cold hours before dawn.

But before that:

NOT LONG AFTER MIDDAY, THE SUN CAME OUT.

The villagers, who knew the value of such moments, got out and about in its warmth immediately. Bedclothes were brought out and hung up to air, lunch tables were set up in the street and in the small gardens of those homes that had them. Down at the river, while Rakan and some of his men watched in bemusement, the villagers stripped down to underwear and flung themselves into what was still very cold water, and splashed about like children. If the presence of the intensely black Kiriath woman and her soldiers put any kind of damper on the proceedings, it was hard to notice.

The imperials themselves weren’t immune to the change. They muttered among themselves that it might be a good omen, and they took the opportunity to bask a little. But having come from the dusty heat of the capital only weeks before, they were neither overjoyed nor impressed, just faintly grateful.

Basking, and reflecting on omens—my brother, my uncle, a friend of mine once saw . . . and so forth—also seemed to help the time pass faster, which was something of a blessing, because there wasn’t much else to do. Preparations for the battle were minimal, and largely symbolic. You can’t build barricades against an enemy that pops into existence wherever it wills, and dwenda tactics were in any case a mystery yet to be revealed. Plans of a sort were laid, but of necessity they had to remain flexible; in the end they amounted to not much more than keeping the locals in their homes under curfew once night fell, and scheduling regular patrols around the village.

Archeth prevailed upon Ringil to give Rakan’s men a brief lecture on what he knew about the dwenda, which he did with a surprisingly deft touch that made her blink. The mannered Glades aristo irony she knew so well peeled and flaked away like scabbing from a healed wound, leaving a dry warrior humor and easy, natural camaraderie in its place. She could see the men taking to him by the second as he spoke. He made none of the threats he’d used earlier, though his overall prognosis for the situation was no more optimistic, and he offered no better hopes for the outcome.

In the end, she realized, he had successfully invited them all to die simply by promising to do it with them.

It was all they would ask of any commander.