Sean

“They’re beautiful.”

They really are. Pinches of sparkling cobalt, sulphur, caerulean. A floor of captive sunflecks. The voyage out of Brixa Thalaam is marked with an unexpected tang of regret, as if the twinkling stones that litter the sea bed are unhappy with our departure. We sail out of the docks, out of the neat buoy lanes that the Thalaami have permanently anchored in their waters. A cadre of bìrlinn from Crowmere pass us on the way in, their sails tucked and their oars plunging deep into the twinkling waters of the bay. As the ships draw closer, the drone of the pipers at their bowsprits grows louder, and several of our crew stamp their feet and sing to the little fleet as it heaves its way to the docks. The enormous looming shadow of Saint Teneral briefly eclipses the sun as we slowly drift out of the port.

Íde stares down into the waters, enchanted. We say nothing, until the stones start to fade into the darkness of the sea, like stars before dawn. One by one, little by little, the miracle seabed wanes, until all we have is the yawning, vertigo-inducing depths of the water below. The Wraithwild falls away from the Gundog Walking, and we are fully alone now, a little sailing island with a gutful of loot and a pack of trailing gulls. I look away from the sea and turn to Íde, who is staring at the massive statue of Brixa Thalaam’s lonely Saint.

“I wonder if he actually looked like that.”

It’s not a bad question. Saint Teneral, cast in gold (or, as Iseult pointed out quietly, plated in a thin layer of it), has been depicted with the broad musculature of a stonecutter, and is handsome enough. I feel like making a joke, but am too worried about her mental state to risk making fun of her.

“I doubt it,” I hazard. “Teneral was a pilgrim. He was probably a lot skinnier in real life.”

Those dusty school hours pry their way back into my memory, and I scrape threadbare memories for any other wisdom that the monk-tutors of my youth tried to impress upon me. But that’s the problem with the Saints. Sometimes it’s impossible to tell what is a metaphor and what isn’t. Maybe Saint Teneral wasn’t even a man, and she’s been misrepresented by a transcription error or some ancient sleight of hand.

Íde’s arms used to be bound from finger to forearm. Now, luckily, she’s just wearing a pair of light gloves. She’s healing rapidly, and we no longer have to spend bitter minutes rewrapping her ruined, bloody palms. Miraculously, neither hand has succumbed to any sort of infection, though every scar and jag in her skin is outlined jarringly with the pitch-dark honey that has worked its way into her body.

I try a soft question: “How are you feeling?”

She breathes deeply and sighs, then breaks her aimless stare and looks me dead in the face. Her expression is haggard. There are lines there that didn’t exist three weeks ago. “I’m okay. Just not sleeping well.”

The lull of the ship is hypnotic. We’re compelled to look away from each other, and each settle on the horizon. The quiet stretches, as we are both content to simply watch the endless expanse before us. It’s a long while before we talk again.

“Dreaming a lot.” She says, after a sailor’s distant call breaks the tentative quiet.

“Is that bad?”

She laughs, a bitter snicker that I haven’t heard from her before. “I don’t know. There’s surprisingly little in the Saint Listless’ curriculum about how you’re supposed to deal with the aftermath of being covered with talkative bees. When my mum gave me advice to be safe on the trip, she probably wasn’t thinking about this. I think I’ll be fine. Just tired.”

Fair enough. I switch the topic, trying to make her feel better. “What else did she say? Did she tell you to steer clear of the food? Or to watch out for Wraithwilders or Al Khazraj?”

She smirks. “Not really. My friends said to watch out for you,” I’m about to protest, but she holds up her hands. “Sorry. Not you in particular, just to be careful when travelling with strange men. I’m sure they’d like you. Also Ailín and Fionn were too busy telling me the beasts of the Wraithwild. My brothers,” she explains, after I cock my head. “They’re ten and eight. Exactly the right age where they learn about every possible monster from every corner of Calacar.”

I consider this- she’s mentioned her family before, of course “And did your friends or your family give you any useful advice? Or just mostly sarcasm and stories of spooky monsters?”

Íde defocuses her eyes for a moment, like she’s actually considering a response. “Well, no. My family is nice. My friends are nice. I got rid of all that sort during my second year. But what’s wrong with sarcasm? Iseult is sarcastic all the time.”

This is somewhat true. Iseult spends most of her waking hours swinging between being needlessly sharp or needlessly blunt.

“Well… fair. But in her defence, she doesn’t use it to pretend to be droll. She’s just sort of like that.”

She makes a flat grunt of affirmation. Then she frowns, struck by a loose thought. “Iseult doesn’t seem that concerned. About me. She really cares about the work, though.”

I wince. “She cares more than you’d think. She just doesn’t show it.”

She looks at me again, hesitantly, like she’s trying hard to keep eye contact. “But why not? Why is it sometimes she seems totally normal, then she just turns? I know she didn’t like me when I met, but now I don’t even know if she trusts me at all. Even after the last few weeks.”

“Look.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “It’s like this. She’s not… you must have noticed. She’s not that good with people.” Iseult’s eyes widen slightly. Okay, maybe you didn’t notice. “Iseult is literally the best at what she does. But where she grew up? Bani Yathrib clan, right? Deep Wraithwild tribe. As in, saw-the-same-people-everyday-until-she-was-a-teenager deep. Not a lot of social exposure. And after what happened to her with her tribe, and then wandering to Ildathach, and the way that we treated her after the war- she doesn’t always show affection. Or knows how to express it. But she does care about you. Believe me.”

Íde chews on her lip, and stumbles out a pair of questions she must’ve been bottling for weeks. “What actually happened to her family in the Wraithwild? And what happened to her in the Aergan?”

The way she says it, in that tone. It’s strange how the words have two meanings now: The Aergan. My home. But also that terrible Aergan, the sea of blood and grass. It’s a little trick, to slice the word in two like that. And my blood begins to stir at the merest mention of the thing, a little simmering thing that cuts me.

The Gundog Walking creaks its way to the horizon. Her first question is, of course, only Iseult’s to answer. But at least I was there for the second. I crack my knuckles, and let the story topple out, five years old and as raw as it’s ever been.

*

“This? This is the vaunted foe of the War Hosts?”

We are not all of Ildathach’s army. Our main body is three days march from here, chasing what we thought was King Eric’s isolated retinue. This, clearly, was a mistake, as the queen is here, in our midst. This parlay she has called is purely ceremonial. She’s here to neither negotiate nor discuss our surrender. The War Chief of the Aergan is here to gloat.

Even now, outside of this tent, one or all of our sigilists must be frantically trying to scry a message back to Ildathach. But those are one-way, calibrated to a known point, and given our course and our position this deep in the Aergan there is no guarantee such a message will be deliverable or understandable. A legible return message from the Chaplain’s Office in Ildathach is astronomically unlikely. Not that it really matters, of course. In a day or two, it will be too late for us.

Her bearing is harsh, her voice steeped in hate. Queen Olivia, now close to sixty years old, has never in her life been known for her subtlety. She’s decided to address us in Irdcheol, and slugs confidently through her mispronunciations, maintaining the poetic style intrinsic to Aerinic. Aergan-dressed in a series of overlapping robes, only a beaten gold torc and a thin crown mark her as the royalty of a kingdom fifty times the area of Ildathach. Her haughtiness, though. The lines on her face. She is every inch a monarch, though she eschews the ostentatious baubles that would betray her nobility. A pair of glinting crimson roses flare on her torc. Her assistants, a scarred woman with a brawler’s build and a slim man with a glimmering rose on his lapel, stand respectfully behind her. The bodyguard has a short shock of hair that barely reaches her ears, and is wearing the thickest sabatons I have ever seen. Her counterpart, the man, is watching affairs unfold with a dog-tired expression. He’s dressed like a hedge-aesthete, and has bound his feet in cloth in lieu of actual boots.

“You,” she points at me, ignoring Colonel Fandh and her entourage. “Idiot boy. You look Aerganite. Are you to die here with the rest of these fools?”

I clear my throat before responding, in Irdcheol. “My name is Sir Sean Whelan, your Majesty. Of Llancreg. I have the honour of serving the banner of-”

She interrupts me with a lungful of cackling laughter. Her bodyguard smirks, though the man behind her does not react at all.

“Llancreg! Oh, ounceland child. Why fight for these miserable worms? Return to your home. I will spare you, lost son of the plains. Leave, and leave us to trample these piddling tyrants.”

I retort with a shrug, and a line from one of my father’s poems. “He who rides a storm must be patient with where it takes him.” It’s a good quip, though it makes no difference. I am bound by Llancreg’s honour to serve Ildathach. Even if it means warring with my cousins.

She titters, and her face flashes from sanguine to terrible as she returns to glowering at the Colonel, who is grinding her teeth. The queen’s next words are spat out in disgust.

“This is the pinnacle of Ildathach civilisation? Recruiting children from your stolen territories, on the borders of my kingdom? He’s barely old enough to shave, and you bring him here, to die? Perhaps my husband will find greater honour in the fearsome ruin he will visit upon your army to the north. I see nothing here but kidnappers and the walking dead.”

Colonel Fandh opens her mouth, then shuts it. She opens it again, and says, firmly: “You underestimate the city.”

Our colonel lacks the wrath or the poetry of the queen. Her breastplate glitters under the baize weave of her cloak, which shifts as she leans heavily on one whale-spine leg. The original was lost to an infection decades ago. Both her hands lay on the sabres of her rank, resting on opposite hips. Colonel Fandh is a minor merchant’s daughter, and against all odds clawed her way past the sneering aristocracy, through the ranks of the Ildathach army.

For the first time in her career, she has blundered.

The queen bays horribly. She crosses the tent floor in a flutter of agile steps, until she is face-to-face with the Colonel. The scent of sawdust and woad swells in her wake. Our entourage bristles as she glowers down at the shorter woman. To her credit, Colonel Fandh returns the favour, head raised to regard the queen. The venom from the Aerganite is palpable, disdain dripping from the words that she spits down upon the Colonel.

“Weak words, from an unburied corpse. Know this: in a day you and your underlings will be crow fodder. We are the divine maul of the Aergan. The orphan children of the Saints. Our hearts are proofed against cowardice, our souls are reeking in contempt. Your swords cannot harm us. Your fleeing legs will fail while our steps quicken. Your bodies will burst under our touch. Your skulls will be plucked from your pitiful, broken forms. The Host is here, and it cares not for the will of Ildathach.”

One of the Colonel’s wards, Major Caird steps forward, his eyes flashing. “Your majesty, some respect is-“

He is cut off by a curt look from the Colonel, and a mirthful, crazed glance from the queen. The royal Aergan bodyguard flexes her shoulders minutely, but keeps outside of striking distance. The queen herself says nothing, and after a long pause turns gracefully and makes to leave.

The Aerganite detachment wheels in step with their queen, passing rapidly to the open tent flap and the waiting ranks of twenty of their painted knights. Her highness stops by me on the way out, and seizes my hand in hers. Her grip is strong, and I can feel the bones in her fingers as she wraps both hands around mine. “A final offer, scion of Llancreg. Leave with us, and abandon the city-dwellers. Their blood is polluted. Even the crows will not peck at their tainted flesh, when we scatter their bodies across the grace.” Her accent shifts, and she finishes her words in our shared tongue, Aerinic. “Idiot boy. Visiting hell upon these leeches will be a joy. If you stay with them, you will be minced into the dirt. Your mother will mourn you over an empty coffin.” She pauses, like she’s just remembered something. “You weren’t entirely wrong. Now is a time of storms.”

I say nothing, and elect to stare down at my hand to inspect the marks of where she gripped my hand, where her rings scuffed my own.

They exit, and a potent silent stews in the tent even after the drumming hoofbeats of their cavalcade fades to nothing. They’ll return to the main bulk of the Aerganite army- thirty thousand War Host riders, led by their queen, in their own country, against us: four thousand men and women, caught unaware and completely out of position. Out of place, tick-ridden and drained by days of marching, trapped in an open plain with nowhere to run. We have taken an immense strategic misstep, chasing what we thought was a weak detachment of clansmen, and tomorrow the Aergan will descend upon us.

*

The knight, on his stomach and suffering from an obviously broken leg, is barking bitter invectives at our gunner.

She’s obviously not from Ildathach, or even Yvreathe. Her face is bisected by an immense, swirling tattoo that starts at the corner of her lips and dyes her face black from ear to clavicle. I have seen her in the months before, of course. Our army is sizable, but not impossibly large. And a face like hers- stern, tanned, tattooed- she’s hard to miss. I’ve never actually spoken to her, before today.

Unlike the rest of us, she’s wearing a simple black robe which covers her from neck to ankle, bound tightly around her forearms and shins. It shrouds her totally, like bombazine. She’s covered in black leather pouches- at her chest, at her stomach, at her groin, at her hips, on her thighs. This is my first time fighting beside her, the two of us standing on the makeshift wagon wall. Her jezail gouts fire and violet smoke every time she cracks it open to reload it, after ever four shots.

I tighten my fingers around the ugly flail at my hip, and watch the knight’s awful dying.

The gunner’s sneering composure has been dented by the punishing tide of the Aerganite assault. Boiled away by the arrows and the lances and the hoofbeats of the War Host knights, who crash endlessly against our section of the wagon fort. When the order had come in to form our supply carts and wagons into walls, and connect those walls to the companies on either side of ours, we’d been bewildered, but obedient. When the following message had been run to us, to sacrifice all nonessential supplies and to build shooting platforms and walls atop those wagons, that confusion had curdled to anger. We did it anyway, and I had carried my share of scrap wood and rapidly nailed our barrels and crates into fortifications with the rest of the men and women in my company.

Now the wisdom of the Colonel’s orders is more obvious- the marauding surge of Aergan riders has been rebuffed multiple times by this unexpected, hastily-constructed fort. It stretches entirely around us in a shabby square, a mostly intact wall comprised of hundreds of yards of wagon-wood and canvas. Had we been in the open, the War Host knights would have ground us into the mud in the first charge.

Missiles thud into the barrier, stubbling our section of the square. Bolts and sling bullets and arrows and, rarely, a flaming pillar from some Aerganite sigilist’s knotwork. The last one set my teeth on edge, and it was by a Saint’s grace that the screaming whip of fire detonated scarce yards short of our wall. We’re steeped in the ghastly smell of the dead and the wounded.

Our rickety wall stands between us and the gleaming plain of the knights, and it seems like scarcely any comfort at all when measured against the shrieking mass of riders and horses that the War Host have brought to bear. I think very little of our fortification, save for when we are ordered to sally to the weak spaces between the wagons and the wall to bring pikes and shields against the horde. Then, I am so wholly consumed by terror that the wall seems like the safest bastion imaginable.

Outside, the grassy plain looks like it could be any corner of the Aergan. I could walk over that distant bluff and see lonely Llancreg. When the wind blows in, gleams of white and gold patter across the emerald field.

The one Aerganite survivor of the last disastrous charge is prone, leg broken awfully, howling a long and warbling curse at a woman I don’t know in a language I don’t speak.

Our gunner’s face betrays an eroding composure. Whatever the knight is saying, it’s certainly making an impact.

We’re insulated from the main thrust of the Aerganite army by this impromptu fortification. The ragged fort was almost entirely completed by the time the War Host realised what we were doing, and contains the entirety of our soldiers and camp followers. Our part of the wall is manned by a little company of a hundred men and women, an assortment of people from across Yvreathe who wouldn’t fit into other units, and is under the control of Watch Captain Moran. I have been assigned to assist this detachment due to my standing as the scion of Llancreg, and have an ambiguous authority over much of the company. I’m under no illusions that this command will survive prolonged contact with the War Host, and am making the most of it while I can.

To our left is the bulk of our fighters, wearing worn but unmistakable uniforms of the Ildathach Constabulary. They are organised under Watch Captain Moran, who is younger than his station would suggest. He hides his inexperience with a sort of sullen momentousness, as if he believes if he scowls with enough conviction we will forget his age. The Watch Captain has the respect of his Constables, though it is not entirely certain how he attained it. When he addresses them, it is with the same taciturn surliness that he uses when he decides to speak with the rest of us.

Though they lack squires or attendants, each Constable is armed with either a pike or a gorgeous Ildathach bow, and all carry a clutch of javelins. They have thus far devastated every wave of charging riders with disciplined waves of missiles. Their bottle-green greatcoats, as potent a symbol as Ildathach as the Dunaidh family crest, have become filthy with miles of marching.

To our right, pacing behind the wagon wall and emerging en masse to shred attacking knights with slings and darts, is a clan of absurdly dressed warriors from Ys lead by old Chieftain Trahaearn. Of the two companies, the Ysian clansmen are dressed far more outlandishly, more colourful and flamboyant than even the painted Aerganites who have fallen against our walls. They brandish pikes as well, ungainly things topped with brightly-coloured bolts of cloth. Choice Ysian warriors brandish outrageous two-swords that are nearly as tall as they are. The Chieftain himself, clad in a foppish hat marked with the fulgid tailfeather on an alpha naemi, wears an iron breastplate which does not in any way draw attention from the crisp cream-and-blue stripes of his pantaloons or his shirt. He’s roaring to his troops now, talking with his hands and his mouth simultaneously in that Ysian style. Unlike his counterpart leading the Constabulary, Chieftain Trahaearn enjoys small-talk a great deal, and is perhaps the most talented person I’ve ever met at filling all possible silences with noise.

Until today, our army had fought only outriders and skirmishers, and had been occasionally harried by missiles and gangs of hooting clansmen who would sweep from behind a hill or a copse to prey on unwary stragglers. Today we face a full War Host, thirty thousand men and women on horseback, wailing and gnashing and roaring against our little fort with a fury like the crush of the sea.

This is the fifth wave, and the broken rider before us is the first to have made it inside of our section of the wall. The gunner, rapidly feeding another handful of bullets into the revolving cylinder of her absurdly long jezail, has blackened her hands and face with the endless fire she has unleashed into the onrushing horde. Hers is the only gun still sounding across the battlefield, and as the Aergan riders have thinned in numbers so has the pace of her weapon slowed. Four shots, then a thirty second pause as she spins a smoking drum out of the side of the thing, withdraws bullets from pouches about her person, and feeds them into the hungry mouths of her weapon.eager Our few other musketeers, peppered around the perimeter of the fort, have either been struck down or spent their weapons, one by one, and now stand with swords or polearms with the rest of the footmen.

Arrows, stones, and bolts still pour from all sides of the fortification, pulling down humans and horses in gruesome waves. They still come, roaring and savage, still charge directly at our wall. I know why- to the Aerganites, the allure of silencing Ildathach’s one remaining firearm must be irresistible. My cousins are eager to realise their honour, always.

Most of our heaviest weaponry, the torsion-throwers purchased from Crowmere, take a day to assemble. Still, our engineers have managed to unpack smaller ballistae and mount them on the hill, and spent the first half an hour of the battle skewering knights and horses with immense fire-blackened bolts that far outranged the return fire from the War Host archers. They stopped firing some time ago; whether to save ammunition or for some less obvious reason, we are not sure.

The knight dying before us is dyed blue from crown to shins, in the Aergan style. His wrinkled flesh is painted with a simple tessellating iconography of stylised yellow eyes. It’s a recognisable iconography- clan Hyde. Distant relatives of mine. He had leapt, impossibly, over the entire wagon wall. He was carrying neither a lance nor a sword, but instead a short flashing spear which had caught in the arm of a fumbling Ysian yeoman named Angharad. I had shattered the Aerganite’s legs with a backhand swipe of my flail when he had been momentarily distracted by the sight of our gunner.

He’s still spitefully hissing at her, but his words seem to be losing their potency. Her face has hardened, and she rises once again to the platform that allows her to see over the impromptu parapet. When she turns away from him, he looks at me instead, and twists his mouth in a hateful snarl. He must be twice my age.

I silence him by splintering his chest with a wet whumpf.

It takes me a moment to dislodge the flail from his shattered ribcage, and as do I rip the spear from his wiry grip. My own pike was torn from me earlier, when I misjudged the charge of a cackling knight and instead buried the weapon in the flank of his horse. With a single step up, I join our gunner, who is already sighting down the length of her absurdly long firearm. Even now, the wall smells like ox sweat.

Before me spreads a charnel field of broken humans and horses, a senseless effigy to the bravery of the War Hosts. Men, women, beasts, some naked, many still moving, all painted and daubed in the garish patterns of the Aergan. A yeoman next to me interrupts my staring with a strangled grunt, and ducks behind the cover of the wagon frame. I frown and glance down at him, and my lack of survival reflex is rewarded by a shower of splinters which spall off of the inside of the wooden wall. A green-fletched arrow quivers an inch to the right of my thigh, its wicked point barely peeking through the solid Ildathach oak.

Our gunner snarls, rests her gun on the wall, and retorts. The offending Aerganite falls, bow still clutched in her scrawny hands, the top half of her head missing. Her corpse bounces on the grass, foot still tangled in her stirrups as her panicked mare, daubed in yet more eyeball symbols of Clan Hyde, bolts back towards the bulk of the War Host.

This dire vignette is repeating itself all around the other sections of the Ildathach wall. Screaming Aerganites fall and crash against Ildathach positions, leaping over or trampling their own dead and dying in their efforts to overrun our little fort. They’ve already succeeded, at least twice- the second more devastatingly, when a clan of lightly-armoured swordsmen managed to entirely breach one section of the wagons, gleefully butchering the archers who had harried them during their insane charge. I watched their broadswords flash in the morning sun, and reap and reap until their faces and clothes were red with the blood of our fallen. Colonel Fandh, from her position at the centre of the fort, had dispatched half of our reserve footmen to fight them back. The tribe had retreated, chased by our reinforcements, hoisting scalps and looted weapons aloft as they sprinted back across the field. I’d seen a horseless raider stumble after being struck by an arrow, and had cheered when a Gallowglass & Grimm mercenary spilled him open like a sack of wine.

This first cohort of attackers comprises of lower cohorts of the Host: auxiliaries, tribes and clans who are either too small or too disgraced to join the main army, and who desperately attempt to curry favour with Queen Olivia. I would know, for I know all of these people by their colours and their heraldry. Now that the battle has started, the main force has encircled us entirely and is slowly coiling closer and closer, content to watch us struggle against the meagre force of their weakest riders.

Eyes scarlet from the smoke of her weapon, the gunner lifts her head. “They’re slowing.”

A light Wraithwild accent. I haven’t heard her speak before. Even after half an hour of this slaughter, where ten or twenty of their knights might fall for the chance to kill one of our footmen, we’ve barely made a dent in their numbers. The field of the wretched dying before us is a miniscule fraction of their total strength.

Why stop now?

I repeat my thought out loud. My companion scowls, but says nothing.

Our section of the fort is a mess, but is not significantly damaged. The wall under us, and the ground a good distance behind, is pin-cushioned with arrows and sling bullets. In front of our wall, a stretch of bodies some hundred yards deep has turned the field into an abattoir. The casualties only increase in density as they grow closer to the fort. At the base of our wagons, our hastily dug trench is overflowing with a trampled slurry of mauled, broken bodies. Now that the constant thunder of hoofbeats has slowed, I can hear the cries of the wounded and the dying.

I let my gaze drop from the killing field. Within the boundaries of our section, the knight I killed is the only enemy present. I gesture towards him, and the gunner follows my hand with smoke-reddened eyes. “What did he say to you?”

“In Mutafasih,” she replies. “Bani Yathrib language. He called me a,” she looks away for a moment, “chalice… maggot? And then he said I was a disgrace to my tribe. Amongst other things,” she pauses for a moment. “Nothing I haven’t heard before.”

The smell hits me in the gulf of quiet left after the first attack. The War Hosts are shifting five hundred yards away, and the noise of their hoofbeats is dulled in the sodden Aergan morning. Even the moans of the wounded and the dying seem to have diminished, now that small numbers of Ildathach footmen from other companies are taking the opportunity to venture beyond the walls of the wagon fort and begin butchering and stealing from the bodies beyond. I hold up a hand as Lieutenant Murphy from the Ildathach Constables makes a move as if to vault the wagon wall to join in. She leans back with a face like thunder. No looting from us until the order is given from the Colonel. I look back at our gunner.

“I’m Sean Whelan, by the way.”

She regards my proffered hand carefully, and shakes it after shouldering her weapon. Her face and hands are stained gunpowder-black. She wipes her bloodshot eyes with the back of her sleeve, revealing a tanned, intense face. The darkness around her cheeks, jaw, and throat, of course, remains. “Isrā Mahrin.”

“Iz-rah?”

“Isrā”, she says forcefully. A frown flickers across her stern face, but she relaxes. “Though you may call me Iseult Morrin.”

I try to correct my pronunciation. “Ok, Iz-rah Mohrin.”

She rolls her eyes. I gesture towards her still-smoking weapon. “It’s a fine piece.”

“It is.”

“How does it work? Oleum? Sigilwork?” I try to scrape a conversation out of the awkwardness.

She snorts, then frowns. “Oh. You’re serious. No, not oleum. Too crude, and too powerful for the job. Would blow out the,” she points at the mechanism near the trigger. “Cylinder. But, yes, a type of sigilwork. Mine.”

There’s a piteous whine from beyond the wall. I peer over, scanning the bloody mess before me. A horse, a scarce ten yards out, on its side. It bays, appallingly, two of its legs broken at unnatural angles, its body mottled with gore and woad. Of its rider, there is no sign. There’s a crumpling mound of dirt at its back where it has obviously scraped along the grass, and it trembles and cries in anguish. I point at it: “Could you put that thing out of its misery?”

She peers over the wagon wall, cautiously. “The horse?”

I nod. She locks eyes with me, and replies. “Yes.”

Her weapon hangs in her loose grip.

I wait for her to do so, but she just looks at me and slowly tilts her head. The rest of the Constables around me are staring at her. The horse continues to whinny, pitifully. “Would you… please do that?”

“Oh.” She looks startled. “I understand.”

Five seconds later, it is done, the thundering gunshot splitting the post-fighting quiet. Even a few of the distant War Host seem to look up, curiously.

The horse is dead. The softness returns.

A flag emerges at the pole in the centre of the fort, to the throaty cheering of the soldiers. I leave the safety of the wagons, following Watch Captain Moran and the fleet-footed Ysians, ready to descend in this wolfing hour on what remains of the enemy, to butcher and loot and wait for the next attack.

*

I stand over the brain-shot horse that Iseult killed, and peer into its remaining eye. I expect some glimmer of meaning, something to stuff the empty hole in my heart and my gut.

I see only a fat black fly, lapping contently at the rheumy eyeball.

*

The gunner thinks about my question for about five seconds before she replies. “I am not sure.”

Finally, hours after it first rose, the sun is beginning to warm our mildewed feet. We’re still on the wagon walls, and it’s inching slowly closer to midday. Our enemy has unexpectedly decided to grant us a respite, and have begun their next assault not by charging into our fort, but by sending a pack of riders to slowly circumnavigate our entire position. They are about twice as far away as our strongest bow will accurately reach, and are little wavering specks atop the waist-high grass of the plains. My companion, the gunner, has been exhausted by the constant fighting. I can see her skull through the bones on her face, see her eyes flit tiredly in sunken sockets.

This group of Aergan knights is tiny, and the rest of their force is likely posturing or manoeuvring out of sight, behind any of the myriad hills that rise and fall softly in the miles around us. A hundred, at most, trot in single-file about four hundred yards from the edge of our fort. They have already circled us once, and are repeating the process, as if looking for an opening.

A single desultory arrow twangs out from the section next to ours, arcing for a few seconds before plummeting down, scarcely reaching half of the distance to the riders. I hear a barked order and a commotion, but cannot see the culprit or his or her officer. It’s understandable, though. After the bloodbath of the morning, this waiting, with the enemy close enough to hear, is awful.

I shudder involuntarily with a momentary chill. My arms begin to prickle with goose bumps, despite the warmth of the sun. If the gunner doesn’t know what they’re doing, I’m willing to chance a guess. “Scouting a weakness, I think. Are you alright?”

Iseult (and it is now most certainly Iseult, after she told me to stop butchering her actual name) frowns, the barrel of her improbably long gun resting across her shoulder. She hadn’t joined us in our foray to pick what meagre goods we could from the hills of dead Aerganites. When we returned, she had been poking at her firearm with a bewildering array of brushes and oils. “I’m fine. Sigilwork. Hollowing.” She says that like I am supposed to understand what it means. “The Host, though- surely they need no more scouting since the morning. They have suffered a few hundred casualties, at most. The vast majority of the knights in the attacks survived, and returned to the main Host. We could repel another wave like that, and the one afterwards. But they could launch scores and scores more, with the number of riders under the Queen’s command.”

She delivers this emotionlessly, and I feel a gnawing dread claw its way into the base of my gut. So many of those casualties were by her hand. At first it was ghastly, standing by her on the wagon wall, listening to the noise of her felling men and women and horses. Then it became routine. Now that I have had more time to think about it, I have returned to being fearful of this foreign woman. Fantastically grateful, however, that she’s on our side.

The distant parade of riders, a confusion of colours and designs, continues their slow, purposeful orbit. A wind blows through the prairie, bringing with it a swirl of patterns in the long grass. More quiet reminders of beautiful little Llancreg.

Our ranks are silent. Occasionally I look back at our men and women in this little section of wall, sandwiched inside this strange impromptu box of wagons. The wounded have been moved to a hospital in the centre of our fort, and those remaining look, if anything mostly just curious. Some companies are doing their best to improve or alter their fortifications, using lessons they learned hastily from the morning’s attack. Most of the Constabulary is busy sorting arrows and attending to their bows, and our Ysians are busy alternating between fixing their weapons and uniforms and staring at the distant parade of the Host.

The air empties, the wind picks up, and there’s a dryness to everything, a feeling of migraine-onset. One of our yeomen cracks a joke, and the laughter that follows is short and bitter. Why aren’t they attacking? What is happening?

A few quiet minutes later, a runner scampers through our lines and reaches me. He looks at me, and his eyes widen when he sees Iseult. He’s breathing hard, and manages to wheeze out a message before sprinting to his next target. “The Colonel wants to see you. The Aerganite and the Bani Yathrib. That’s, uh, both of you.”

He scampers off. Watch Captain Moran looks at us strangely, then shrugs. We turn and walk briskly to the centre of the fort. It does not take long.

The Colonel’s tent is about a tenth of the size of the hospital it squats beside. We pass a pair of hurrying, blood-spattered surgeons, and I see shapes moving behind the flimsy canvas of the hospital tents. The surgeons don’t stand like the brusque sawbones of Llancreg- their fingernails are clean, and they hold themselves proudly. Both have stripped to their shirtsleeves, which have been rolled to their elbows, and both have blood-stiffened shirts and faces. One is holding a pail of ether-soaked sponges.

There’s a familiar tang in the air, of blood and corruption, accompanied by moans and quiet weeping. Until today, our army’s surgeons have been concerned primarily with infection and various diseases- scrofula, grippe, cholera. Their constant obsession with cleanliness has drawn a fair share of snide remarks from the rest of the soldiers. Now they’ve spent the intervening hours variously staunching bleeding, amputating limbs, and delivering Saintly mercies. A half dozen of our company have already been sent or carried to this part of the fort.

Iseult doesn’t react to them at all. The two of us stamp past the hospital, and I hold the Colonel’s tent flap open for her to enter. There is no Ildathach-style politeness shuffle where she tries to wave me past first. She just walks in.

The breeze follows us through the canvas door. Iseult and I enter, to join the Colonel’s small coterie. The pair of us, bloodstained and sooty, stand amidst a small assembly of officers and staff. Most of the tent is bare, save for one wall, which is emblazoned with a massive crown-in-crucible, the familiar emblem of Ildathach’s Dunaidh family.

Nobody is exactly clean, after this many weeks on the move, but the division between the every-day stains and dirt of their uniforms and the absolute destruction of our own is stark. I am suddenly very conscious of the bloodstains on my clothes. Colonel Fandh glances briefly at the pair of us and then continues, obviously mid-conversation. She speaks directly at a large figure, who is bent over some sort of map. “So your hypothesis is…?”

Major Caird responds gruffly, directly. He’s not monstrously large, but he has a presence and a way of furrowing his brow that suggests a tacit threat of violence. His tartan marks him from ounceland Caronek, and his delicate spectacles and shock of white hair somehow add, rather than detract from, his stern countenance. He unfolds himself from his stoop over the table and rests both hands on the pommel of his short sword, a stripe of crimson leather against the dark green wool of his coat. I notice about a second later that he’s sheathed a bone-handled knife directly into one sock, just under his kilt. “It is impossible to determine. We repelled the initial assault, though our line was breached in three places. The first was blunted, at some cost. The second caused casualties in our lines. The third,” he glances over at Iseult and me, “was entirely ineffective.”

He pauses, then turns to regard the sharply-dressed sigilist behind the Colonel.

“There are several possible explanations for their current behaviour. The first is that they are scouting, and are using sighting wards to inspect the damage from beyond our missile range.” The sigilist, Chief Sigilist Sheridan Afnysin, starts nodding. His hands and face are soot-free from the fighting, which is somewhat surprising because he’s been proudly toting a combat harquebus for as long as we’ve been in the Aergan. The glowing rose on his lapel bobs in time with his bouncing head. “The second option,” the Major continues, “is that they are posturing for an assault. This seems less likely due to two factors: the weather has continued to hold, and they have now completed several orbits. Therefore they must have enough information to mount an attack. The third is that this is simply an intimidation, or some Aergan ritual. Morale is fine, though our soldiers are uneasy. The fourth is, of course, that they are planning something that we cannot guess.”

Here, the Major has admitted his potential ignorance. For a gentleman who keeps Ildathach company, this is unusual. Maybe it’s a Caronek quirk. I want to offer my opinion, that this isn’t any Aergan ritual that I am aware of, but I know better than to speak out of turn.

A light wind blows through the tent, shaking and clapping the canvas walls. The Colonel folds her arms and looks as if she is about to talk. Iseult, astonishingly, speaks first.

“They’re not using that type of sighting knotwork. At least, not to examine us or our fortifications.”

All heads turn to her, this smoke-blackened foreigner. She meets their gawking imperiously. Chief Sigilist Sheridan frowns and speaks up. “It is the opinion of the Ildathach sigilists that they are using some sort of ward in order to inspect us-“

“Yes,” Iseult replies, scratching the back of her head with her heavily tattooed trigger hand. “They’re absolutely writing some kind of charm. But you misunderstand.”

Sheridan’s voice quakes with barely-controlled anger when he responds. “I think you will find it is quite unacceptable for you to speak to a gentleman of my stature like that, Miss Morrin.”

Iseult replies, immediately. “Perhaps, then, the gentleman should offer a suggestion worthy of his standing.”

“Mind your tongue, witch-“ he’s livid, and takes a step towards her. Normally I would stand by my new friend and defend her, though I’m frozen with a curious and unexpected numbness, like the morning’s fighting has totally quelled my heart. I expect one of the others in the tent to say something, or react in some way, but the entourage and the Colonel herself also seem content to watch. Perhaps they too have been jaded by the slaughter. The duty falls to me, fatigue or no.

I try my best. “I believe the gentleman will find that now is not the time to make enemies amongst friends. I’m sure that there was no foul to his honour intended.” It’s a good defusal, promptly ignored by both the gunner and the Chief Sigilist. Iseult moves against him, fearlessly, a foot shorter and vibrant with a dire focus. They’re within a yard of each other, and he wraps his hand on his thin officer’s sword. The wind snaps through the tent, blowing straggling hairs over her forehead.

I pray, with all my being, that she will try to calm the situation.

She speaks. “You have a surprising number of triggers for a man who can’t use his gun.”

The sigilist’s mouth drops open, and his hand curls around the pommel of his sword. He turns, furious, to the Colonel. “Will you accept this disrespect from a foreigner? Or a common hedge w-“

“Enough, Chief Sigilist.” This time from Major Caird. A vein is clearly protruding from the side of his neck. “We will all have our chance at honour, later. But we must survive until tomorrow. Miss Morrin has proven herself today, would you not agree, sir Whelan?”

Thank the Saints. I reply quickly, not wanting to lose the opportunity to calm the tent. “Yes, of course. From our barricade she executed enough knights that it lessened what would otherwise have been a potentially overwhelming attack.”

Sheridan snarls, redirecting his bruised ego. Unable to find a soft target with Major Caird, he instead settles on me. “And you, Aerganite, have experience with warfare? Your opinion on the state of battle is warranted? Will you lead us on the field tomorrow?”

The man must be talented, or excruciatingly well connected, to have risen to the position of Chief Sigilist. But it’s a strange thing to see this sort of biting comeback from a professional sigilist. I’ve met a handful of knotworkers before. The vocation doesn’t normally attract individuals who lack a certain amount of detachment. Like the vast majority of people, I was never able to come close to learning to meditate enough to form usable charms.

“There won’t be a tomorrow, for us.” Iseult is staring at the thick, bleached canvas of the command tent as it snaps in the breeze. “They’re not using knotwork. They are knotwork. They’re making a myth.”

The sigilist laughs, mockingly. “What Bani Yathrib lunacy is this?”

Colonel Fandh speaks, holding up a single finger. “Chief Sigilist Afnysin, you will be ejected from this tent if we are subject to another one of your outbursts. Do I make myself clear?”

Hints of iron play out under her politeness, like muscles shifting under a jacket. Her hazel eyes narrow, the wrinkles of her face settling into long-engrained furrows.

I am thunderstruck when it seems the Chief Sigilist’s gall will lead him to speak against the Colonel, and am immensely relieved when he takes a step back, alternating odious scowls between Iseult and me. Sheridan’s anger is one born of timidity, rather than heart.

“Please continue, Miss Mahrin.” The Colonel says her surname slightly differently, a mouthful of Bani Yathrib syllables. Iseult continues, eyes closed.

“Have you noticed the wind? The temperature? The sun is at midday, and yet it is just as brisk as the morning. It’s abnormal. The Host is not parading some random perimeter around us. We know the queen is one of the most talented sigilists in Yvreathe. Perhaps on all of Calacar. They’re starting a charm.”

Major Caird’s face pales. The room is split between nonchalance and confusion, and waits for the Colonel to consider this.

“A circle, with a square in the centre. This is the basis of a rune that every sigilist knows, a-“ Sheridan, eager to retain face after being dismissed, interrupts her. “A death charm.”

Iseult rolls her eyes to the ceiling for a few heartbeats. She has balled her hands into fists. “Yes. What I would call an emptiness configuration. The start of one, anyway. The horsemen are inscribing a circle. We have already made a comparatively tiny square, with the wagons. Once the queen is happy with the initial linework, she can begin completing the sigil.”

“She has a reputation,” our Colonel continues, flicking her eyes between Iseult and the Chief Sigilist. “Is it warranted?”

“Yes,” the two say simultaneously, agreeing for the first time. Iseult boils noticeably, and speaks over Sheridan. “Beyond warranted. The queen has a command of knotwork that exceeds that of any other individual’s in Yvreathe, the Aergan, the Wraithwild, or Khazraj. Her talents are similar to what we see from the Tecuani on the Far Shore.” This sentence in particular ripples through the assorted officers.

She continues. “It is very hard to overstate the effect that Queen Olivia has had on sigilists all across the continent. You may know she wrote several essays on magic. You may not know that these are thousands of pages long, form the cornerstone of what we consider modern Yvreathan knotwork, and contain a handful of charms that are lethal for other sigilists to attempt. I have witnessed this event personally.

“The Queen has not penned a document in close to a decade. We do not know what she is capable of, but for my entire life she has been the only person capable of performing some of the magics that she herself invented. So yes. It is a warranted reputation.”

The Colonel folds her arms. “Very well. Concerning your hypothesis regarding the emptiness configuration- the death charm. I am aware, superficially, of the topic. My specialty is not in knotwork, so I appreciate your patience. But. This seems impossible. Is each horseman a sigilist? How are they maintaining their focus amongst so many of them? Surely each one cannot be talented enough to keep the work stable. And the dead, the earth that has already been trampled, surely this must be interfering with the charm itself? How are they ensuring that the knotwork is precise enough to activate correctly?”

That same didactic, layered speech patterns as the Major.

Iseult nods slowly along with his points, and again looks askance at the tent wall, deep in thought. “All sigilists should be able to write an emptiness configuration. They have several uses, which is why the term death charm is not the preferred term outside of Yvreathe. It is unclear how they are doing it. And yet- it is happening. Each horseman doesn’t need to understand the knotwork to form it, no more than a piece of chalk or a knife needs to have a sigilist’s mind. They’re the queen’s writing tools, and she’s preparing and visualising the sigil, using their bodies to write it. There are configurations that can be arranged so that the magic starts as soon as enough of the charm is made, without the need for an activation rune. As long as the sigilist herself is focused enough, it’s theoretically possible…”

A few of the officers, Colonel Fandh included, are frowning at this revelation. I’m glad that I’m not the only person in the tent who is out of his depth. My knowledge of the subject is purely second-hand. Not even academic, as the officers’ likely is. There are sigilists in Llancreg, of course, but I proved to have no talent for that work as a child, and despite my father’s disappointment, my mother was more than happy to have me learn other, more practical subjects.

“During the attacks, where they dedicated only a fraction of their forces. Maybe this was never about actually fighting us. She could have just been testing our formation, using the time to do the mathematics for the line weights and pattern configurations. She probably never intended to use this on us, now. It just fell into place for her. And she doesn’t need to write a good sigil. Just enough to drive us out of the fort and into the fields for her knights.” I’ve never heard of a sigil this size. But I know better than to underestimate the War Host- the stories surrounding Queen Olivia’s skill as a sigilist have reached all corners of Yvreathe.

I’m glad when Major Caird speaks, because I have a similar question but am afraid to voice it. “Pardon my ignorance, Miss Morrin. What precisely is an ‘emptiness configuration’?”

“Are you,” she pauses, and looks for a moment like she’s struggling. “Aware of a sun sigil?”

“Aye.” The Major says, flatly. We all do. It’s an easy answer- perhaps Iseult can’t exactly calibrate how ignorant we are to her in comparison.

“Well an emptiness configuration is the opposite of that. More precisely: cold, a killing force, a specific space of nothing. Sometimes all three at once. Hence emptiness configuration. Any knotwork-assisted cold is powered by them. Dangerous, but commonplace enough.”

“And still not possible. Not on this scale, not by a single sigilist. No individual would be capable of controlling the entire process.” This time from Colonel Fandh, to the quiet glee of the Chief Sigilist.

“Beyond the human cost, it’s theoretically conceivable. But from a practical standpoint … you’re right. The strain would be too high. At this scale there would be too interference from the horses, let alone the minds of the riders themselves. It would totally collapse the mind of the knotworker.”

“Then why would you offer such an outrageous suggestion?” Asks an officer, a captain whose name I cannot recall. Behind the Colonel, Sheridan is silently beaming.

“When the Tecuani annihilated a fifth of your city with a charm from half the world away, do you think your contemporaries a century ago complained that they didn’t understand how?”

The wind flaps the tent walls. A tent peg has come loose outside, and one of the walls has opened very slightly in the breeze. No further counterarguments are offered.

“The charm is being built around the square of this fort, with us in the centre,” the Colonel intones, levelly. “We cannot rearrange the fort, because we will be attacked instantly. We cannot leave, because we will be cut to ribbons. So what do you suggest we do?”

Iseult breathes for a few moments, all eyes on her. She looks up, sharply, and frowns. “I do not know.”

*

The impossible charm is well underway now. There is no arguing with Iseult’s idea, for the effects are undeniable. To complete the glyph’s curving geometries, the Aergan riders now occasionally stray into missile range, dismounting from their horses and trampling grass and soil in precise, muddy lines. Unnatural cold has gripped the field, and temperatures have been slowly dropping for the last hour.

Uncommonly, one of our arrows or bolts takes a knight to the ground. Those stricken bodies are promptly recovered by other Aerganites, eager to prevent interference with the hundred-yard geometries of the glyph. Under Iseult’s recommendation, we have started to send parties outside of the protection of the wagons, to carve our own simple counter-charms into the dirt and cast Aergan corpses in disarrayed configurations around our fort. The War Host, unable to simply charge us, has responded by sending out bowmen in precise arrangements to loose arrows into our ranks.

It is a strange way to fight a war. Iseult was right: the charm itself doesn’t need to be particularly good. Just crude enough to freeze us out, or to bring a wind that will drive us from the fort. She’s fairly certain from the lines she can read that the queen is not able to carve the sort of rune which will invite sightless, boiling death onto everything within the circle. Nor will the Aerganites be able to remove the air itself from around us. That’s a nice thing, at least. I’m also not sure why the entire Host doesn’t simply attack us- clan honours must demand another pack of knights be assembled to attack our walls by now. Perhaps the queen isn’t willing to take those kind of losses, and has elected to use magic rather than spearpoints to butcher every one of us.

“I still don’t understand how she’s doing it,” Iseult mutters, darkly.

“Well that’s worrying, because you’re the most talented sigilist we have.”

She cracks a smile at that. “This would’ve been easier if you’d just stabbed her in the heart when she came to gloat.”

The thought had literally not occurred to me. I can’t tell if Iseult is joking, or if she would actually consider assassination a legitimate option. Her face softens, returns back to its neutral semi-scowl.

“What I said, in the tent. About what the Tecuani did to your city during the Calamity. There’s so much we don’t know about knotwork. There’s even more that you Yvreathans and Al Khazraj don’t either. To assume that she’s bound by our understanding of magic- that’s folly. It doesn’t matter that a glyph of this power should pulp her brain like a rotting apple. It’s happening.”

“Our city,” I reply.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Our city. You said your. I’m not from Ildathach either. Yet we’re both fighting for her.”

She considers this point, then sighs severely.

“Strange how that works out. The western Aerganite tribes… they’re much closer to my people than to Ildathach’s. But, fine. Our city. Mildewed and polluted and filthy. Though you are the one who is betraying your relatives, Aerganite.”

I want to ask her why she’s here. But now is not the time.

She shivers. Our part of the fort, my men and women, are restless. Twenty minutes ago, I had asked Iseult to quietly execute one of the War Host who was straying within a hundred yards of our wall. The knight’s head was bent down to stare at his feet, fixated on carving a precise meandering pattern with his footsteps. The fighters from Ys had cheered when the man jerked upright, shot through with a jezail bullet. Iseult had spun the chamber of her weapon, sighted again, and done the same to a woman even further distant, her barrel burning with faint violet smoke. That momentary happiness, however, had died down. Now, shuddering occasionally in the steadily freezing air, the misery has returned.

“It doesn’t make sense. Knotwork this imprecise shouldn’t be able to manifest, at this scale. Or any scale. You can’t just make glyphs without immense precision. Not that it makes a difference. We can’t leave the circle, or they’ll butcher us. We can’t stay here, or we’ll freeze to death.”

“Isn’t there some kind of counter-charm you can work?”

She shakes her head. “Not if me and all the other sigilists tried. That’s not exactly how it works. Could definitely shoot the queen in the head though. That would solve the problem. That is,” she pauses, and looks concerned, “if she’s the one who’s actually doing this.”

Queen Olivia has been noticeably absent from the battlefield. War Host tribes aren’t unified by pipes or drums, so there have been no tell-tale music of her entourage, not in the way that Ildathach companies would be. But Aergan clans each have their own idiosyncrasies, and the queen’s compatriots should be decorated in the royal heraldry of her clan. Of all the riders we have seen today, none have belonged to the queen’s family. But she must be there, somewhere, watching.

*

“We’re walking out.”

It’s not a question. The runner shivers as he delivers the message to Watch Captain Moran: even the air has begun to thin, and the cold has burrowed into us all. Terrible, coiling frost, in the guts and the lungs. Terrible not because of the temperature, which is bearable, but because of the implication that we are being culled by an enemy that we cannot touch. It is an almost intolerable weight.

We are nothing, if not enduring. And now we will make our escape.

The waiting is the worst. Two hours of sniping at our enemy, reducing their numbers by the handful as they construct the intricate charm around us. This has had no actual effect on the Aergan horde. It is impossible to make out the precise shape of the sigil, but the curves and lines that have been gouged into the mud are unmistakable. As is the freezing death that descends upon us.

In the air, we can now see where the charm ends, where the air becomes thick and warm, a wall that rises from the edge of the great circle the Host has engraved around us. Breathing reminds of the frozen weeks I spent climbing mountains near Ys. Behind me, our footmen shudder in the cold, steel mail rattling.

Hands twist bitterly around spears. Bloodshot eyes set on the horizon. The Ildathach army, stricken with an inexplicable winter, is soon to march to its death. Our orders, courtesy of this runner, are simple.

“You are to form a schiltron with the thousand others on this quarter of the fort. Archers and gunners in the third row, pikes and shields in the first and second. We make a square and we march until we are out of the charm. Follow the Colonel’s timing.”

Iseult looks at me, when Watch Captain Moran and Chieftain Trahaearn begin fervently discussing the logistics of the manoeuvre. “Schiltron?” She asks.

“Like a square,” I make a square gesture with my hands. Ysian hand-talking is contagious. “Horses only like charging thin lines of soldiers. So we make a very compact shape, stuffed with walls of spears and pikes, and hope that we can shoot better than they can.”

She makes a face. “Does that work?”

“It’s similar to how we made the wagon fort. Except this time, we’re the wagon. And we’re going to try to move.”

The soldiers around us are clearly unhappy. The Constabulary and the Ysian clansmen will cooperate well enough within their own groups, but have rarely marched, shoulder-to-shoulder, with each other. An infantry square is a hard enough thing, when braced in one position. To coordinate a movement across several hundred yards is unthinkable. Our pipers begin a long, slow drone, and our drummers try their best to keep us organised.

We abandon the fort a few minutes later. There is no time to arrange ourselves any better.

A great cheer arises from the distant Host as the first of our troops emerges from the wagon walls. We march over the dead, stamping their frosty corpses beneath our boots. More than a few have had their throats cut, no doubt by our looters as they pilfered the fallen of their paltry trinkets. The Aerganites hoot and celebrate at our flight. Only a handful of knights remain inside the circle, shivering as they carve the remaining flourishes of the charm.

Our infantry square is a messy thing, one of four muzzy shapes that slowly form, then begin to tromp to the edge of the circle. Directed by Watch Captain Moran, we plod towards the edge of the knot, three hundred yards away at most. If I were by myself, without the others, I could make the run in under sixty seconds. But we are so, so slow. This march will take minutes, locked as we are into a dense, unwieldy schiltron. If the Aerganites were to attack now, we would be caught, shivering, with no walls and no fortifications. They know this, and move to oblige.

The Hosts begin to spread outside of the edge of the charm. Swells of men and horses, a river of seething bodies that moves to surround us, contain us, but leaves the perimeter of the great sigil untouched. Their shrieks of delight are audible at a great range, and the sight of the yelping current of riders, some of whom are wearing nothing and clutching only short spears, makes me murmur a prayer to the Saints. Our Constables are stone-faced and grim. Chieftain Trahaearn is ruminating with fiery tones, and the Ysians are, astonishingly, in good spirits. He looks over at me, points directly with a fat sword, and shouts something that I only catch a portion of: …the splendour of glorious death, which is done only in the company of unflinching heroes…”

There’s a smell in the air, like something sweet. Warmth suddenly flickers through the abnormal cold, like the day is blinking.

“We’re ruining the knotwork.” Iseult’s voice has a tinge of mirth that is entirely unexpected. I realise with a start that she’s right. The bootsteps of the four thousand men and women marching out of the centre of the glyph has done more damage to the charm than we achieved in the hours of trying to disrupt its workings from inside the fort.

“Sean,” she continues, suddenly urgent. “It’s enough to misconfigure the charm. She’s going to have to come out.”

Arrows begin to rain down on our square, and our men and women start to die. We have shields. They do not always work. A clanswoman from Ys stares dumbly as a broad arrowhead splits the weak wood of her shield and plunges directly through her forearm. Around us, bodies start to fall, and the screaming starts. The squares cannot stop. We either pull the dying with us or stamp them to death with prayers for forgiveness. We cannot yet return fire, not without stopping, and the arrows either clatter off shields or bury themselves in dirt and flesh.

Queen Olivia emerges from the distant ranks of the War Host.

It’s enough of a sight that it almost paralyses our entire square. She, and the twenty or so others riding respectfully behind her, are not bedizened in the riotous paint of the rest of the Host. They are golden, radiant, sun-touched. Light flashes from glyphs on their armour, and their horses’ armour, and the effect is almost blinding. A shining golden wedge, the herald of this sudden, terrible winter. At their head, the woman working to annihilate us. Her hands are raised. Her head is wreathed in a massive violet halo that is visible from hundreds of yards away.

Iseult gasps. The man beside me stumbles, terrified. I keep him up, but our section of the schiltron is already losing cohesion.

The Hosts, some of whom have already galloped around the perimeter of the charm so they are lurking behind our square, pincering it from every angle, notice our fear. Their cries and jeers rise even louder.

Cold thunders down on us. The queen has increased her efforts, and Iseult gapes openly at the effort. “Madness. I don’t understand how she’s still alive.”

“Can you shoot her?” Iseult shakes her head, and little shimmers of frost break on her braided hair. “Not from this range. Believe me.”

We continue marching forward, lockstep, and the bulk of the Host has already started to arrange itself at the exact position our square is moving towards. It is death, then- either inside the charm, of cold, or outside, where the wrath of the Host will smear us into the grass. Iseult keeps talking, trying to mask her fear. “There are charms on these bullets that might be able to reach her. But I would need something of hers. Something she’s touched.”

Wait.

I am so suddenly focused that I almost fall out of step with the square. “Something like what?”

She spins to looks at me, suddenly awake, eyes flashing in the cold. “Like a possession. A cup. A pen. Preferably something she’s put her hands or her mouth around. Can’t be alive.” Hands tug at her, pulling her back into formation with the infantry square. She’s staring wild-eyed at me, desperate for an answer.

I stare down at my hands, and the dull brass of my family’s ring.

*

“You could have fucking said it sooner!”

She has to shout, because true wrath has finally descended upon the Ildathach army. An unending storm of shrieking infernal Aerganites. Horses, terrified, culled by waves of arrows, bolts, and, rarely, bullets. The terrible sensation of bodies crashing into pikes, the weight of a thousand seconds of slaughter. Iseult is still firing, minutes later, having secreted a seemingly unlimited supply of scrimshawed bullets over her person. She’s shooting and reloading at three times the pace she worked at in the morning.

“Well I didn’t know!”

My ring, my father’s ring. Now singed and blackened, though, astonishingly, still wearable. Iseult had warned me it could be destroyed in the process, though at that moment I could not have cared less. She had taken it, done something with it. When she had opened her eyes, they had slipped at an angle that made me queasy, and she had blinked back tears until her irises were ringed in crackling amethyst. Her hands had moved smoothly around her weapon, and she had bolted from our barely-moving square to the field before us. The Constables beside us had thought her a coward, or a defector, but had stifled their cries when she dropped into a firing crouch.

A second alter, I was beside her. She had slowed her breathing, and her tattooed finger had drifted glacially around the trigger guard of her gun. Her entire being was focused down that line, pointed at the queen. She had said, quietly: “Say something.”

“What?”

“Say anything. Make it good. It’s part of a counter-ritual.”

I had thought for a moment, about what the queen had said in the tent, when we had met. Something my mother had said, too. I repeated it, in Aerinic. “Now is a time of storms. So I bathe my hands in the thunder, and drown my heart in the tempest.”

Words crackled like static on my tongue. She inhaled them, held her breath halfway. When she had fired, it was not the normal crack-whip of the jezail. She had been totally engulfed in violet smoke, and a shroud of the stuff enveloped both of us, deafened me entirely. For a moment, I saw her eyes shine like stars in that magic-drowned haze.

Three heartbeats later, the queen, sun-sigils snuffed out, had tumbled from her horse. Regal no longer, just a corpse in a yellow coat. The cold had lifted, instantly, and a shockwave had detonated outwards from the edge of the charm’s circle, hurling masses of flailing Aerganite bodies by the thousands, by the tens of thousands.

Minutes later, after the survivors had regrouped, they started their revenge.

The full fury of the War Hosts falls upon us. I am holding a pike, slick with horse blood, at a corner of our battered schiltron. One of our squares was collapsed in the first two minutes of fighting, its men and women either fleeing to the other formations or cut down by whooping knights. I do not know who was in its centre, but they too must have been executed, then ground into the grass. Our square had tightened, standing impossibly against the riders, a rock against a murderous sea.

A rider, dismounted, runs at our line with his mouth wrenched open in a scream I cannot hear. He is followed by a troupe of his clansmen, and a cluster of knights further to his right, but he alone is leading a charge towards us as his fellow warriors stumble behind him. He is covered in wooden plates- not armour, but painted depictions of Aergan legends, of Saints and monsters from a thousand years ago. They clank and bounce with his sprint, and he descends upon us with hellish intent. An arrow catches him in the gut and he pauses, snarling, then begins a long, slow crawl towards our line. He is eclipsed by the horde of his fellows who pass over and around him.

My mother used to keep a collection of wooden pictures just like his.

Iseult sights, fires, and repeats, stopping every few moments to discharge and reload the cylinder of her weapon. My ears have long since accustomed to the thunderclap of her jezail. A horse collapses in the swelling wave, but the galloping animal is one of many, and the animal and its unlucky rider are trampled under her companions’ hoofbeats. Another clan I do not recognise descends upon our square, weathering the killing storm of missiles that fly thick from our formation.

It is bravery, and idiocy. The front of the charge begins to crumple as it strikes the wave of the dead. This in turn trips more horses, and throws or cripples more of the attackers. A handful break through, and are faced with a glittering wall of bloodstained Ildathach steel. Beside me, one of the Constabulary laughs ghoulishly as he pins an Aerganite through the gut with a pike, the confused knight slapping ineffectively at the weapon as it runs him through. The knight’s shield, I notice with disgust, has two gnarled human hands nailed to it. Beside me, a pair of Ysians tighten their grips around swords almost as long as I am, and begin breathing deeply, rapidly, rhythmically. They will protect me if any rider bats the wall of pikes aside and comes close enough to try to break through the square. Chieftain Trahaearn died minutes ago, caught in the throat with an Aergan hunting arrow. His second-in-command extols the Ysians with stories of Saints and ancestors with a hoarse throat and a bloodshot remaining eye, scorning death and our foe.

The fury of the War Host thickens the air, and it is in my mouth and my heart and I cannot, I will not, survive. This is the end of my life. Scarcely over twenty, in a meadow with no name, surrounded by men and women I do not know, butchered gleefully by my cousins. I am going to die. I am going to die in half an hour. This I decided twenty minutes ago, when the first rider reached our lines, when I watched him drop, formless, from a pair of javelins to the chest, and his horse slid through our square and maimed or killed at least five of us. I wouldn’t even know how much time passed, if the Ysian clansmen didn’t call out every two minute interval in some insane, tribal ritual. Every minute becomes clogged with centuries. Our remaining Constables have run out of arrows, and their long pikes quiver in their wavering hands.

I don’t want to die. I want to live. I want to live and I cannot run, because there are warriors behind me and beside me. Before every face of the square is the reaping mass of the Hosts, and already parts of our formation have been met by Aerganites, parts of other squares have crumbled. I reach and I stab and I feel like crying but I cannot, and I feel like stopping but I cannot, and the only thing that keeps us fastened to reality is the idiot timing of the Ysian shaman and the crack-crack-crack-crack of Iseult’s weapon.

I will die in five minutes, and the call ripples down the line to brace. Needless, I think, my hands cold and clammy around the fire-hardened wood of an Ildathach pike, one that I scavenged from a fallen Constable. We can see them coming, for they never stop coming, and now that we have almost depleted our javelins and our darts and our slings and our arrows they will come for us. My body will be gored by a gloating Aerganite, or broken under an unshod hoof, or perhaps I will simply be maimed and forgotten, and then my throat will be slit by the looting warriors of the Hosts. Now, in the tide of knights approaching, a naked Aergan woman chooses me, improbably, pointing directly at me from the charging wall of horses. Her axe is held high, and blood streaks down her chin, from scarlet teeth and tongue.

The wall of horses draws closer, their hoofs threshing together. They ride so closely that every missile finds it mark, and every rider is a target, but their numbers barely thin, and I will die in three minutes, and again I am braced, waiting for the bulk of the animal that will grind my body into the mud, or the laughing knife that will bring my soul to the Saints.

For every one of ours that is slain, by missiles or lances, we take more and more in return. The death of hundreds of Ildathach soldiers from the first broken square reminds us that there is no way out.

*

“So she did actually kill the queen. I thought that maybe they made that part up, on her statue.”

Íde’s voice shocks me out of the memory. It’s started drizzling, and I realise with some surprise that I don’t know precisely what to say, or why I started talking about this. She wanted to know about what happened to Iseult. Right. I finish the story.

Yes, Isrā Mahrin became famous after the war. They didn’t call her Isrā, of course. Didn’t use her real last name either. The sobriquet she adopted was used in the papers, and the plaques, and the monument in the upscale neighbourhood of Black Courts: Iseult Morrin, Gunner. No daguerreotypes were taken of her, either. Her official portrait was sanitised, a masterful woodcut that neglected her tattoos, shifted her features ever so gently to align with those of an Ildathach lady’s. A saviour of the city.

When the four thousand killed the queen, then spent a month limping back to Ildathach, it was a turning point in the war. Queen Olivia was always the lynchpin of the War Hosts. Beyond being the War Chief, she understood the fragile web of families that comprised the Host far better than her husband did. King Eric, the warrior, had a fraction of his wife’s grace. Her death was the catalyst for ugly clan fragmentations to re-emerge.

After withdrawing from the field, we battled the War Hosts again only once, and crushed them without having to strip our half-wrecked supply wagons for another fortification. We did not re-join the rest of the Ildathach army: we walked back to friendly territory, harried by increasingly desperate and disjointed Aergan outriders. For the first time in weeks, we were able to send out scouts and skirmishers far beyond the protection of our army, and I remember the feast from the first time one of our foraging parties had returned at the head of a herd of aurochs.

My mother taught me that war was waged as a community, and that no individual could ever hope to change the course by herself or himself. But I saw a woman who did it. I saw her heroism. And then I waited in the aftermath, after we finally made it back to the city. After they piled praise on the Colonel, after they paid Iseult and then dismissed her. She had visited me, a month later, uncomfortable in a stiff Ildathach court dress. I had had no idea how she knew where I lived. But we had sat together, and had coffee, and it had taken me twenty minutes to realise that she was absurdly, deeply drunk. She hadn’t cried, I remember that. She hadn’t cried and she wasn’t angry.

She’d brought up, afterwards, if it bothered me that I had fought against my cousins, for a city that wasn’t my own. At the time, of course it hadn’t.

Getting sucked into memories again. I look at Íde, flattening my emotions. “Yes. That’s why she’s famous.”

“I’m not sure what kind of person can kill royalty. But I’d believe Iseult can do it.”

I think about this for a moment, and can’t think of anything clever to say. “Queens die just as easily as soldiers.”

I’ve left out the hard parts. The disease, mostly. None of the stories that I heard from my mother, none of what was written in the books, talked about how we’d lose so many men and women to coughs and fevers. Very few even discussed the way we’d have to pile bodies into pits, in sheltered little places about the Aergan. How we’d beseech the Saints and built monuments to protect those who had passed. Ildathach keeps a trail of standing stones and cairns that cuts halfway through the Aergan.

“But… why didn’t you chase down the remnants of the War Hosts? Why leave some of the knights alive?”

An uncomfortable question. “You don’t just… murder people. You know that Saint Mantis liturgy? ‘To a fleeing enemy, you build bridges of gold’. What would killing more Aerganites accomplish? We were trying to end the war, and cutting off the head of the War Host was much more effective than trying to kill the body. We actually helped a lot of the clans escape, by pretending to chase off the weaker ones. If we’d wasted time trying to chase down one specific family, it might’ve given the others a chance to reunite.”

She scoffs. “So we let them live. And then it all ended peacefully.”

The planks beneath us creak, shrinking in the steadily cooling waters north of Crowmere. I wonder how much of Íde’s curriculum was edited by the censors of the Chaplain’s Office. In the months after the war ended, I was gently reminded by Dour House agents at two separate social events that I was speaking rather forthrightly about the events.

“Well, you were alive during the war. What do you think?”

She looks over the choppy waters and grips the bullet necklace Iseult gave her between a thumb and forefinger. The explanation she offers could have been lifted directly from Ildathach’s newspapers: “After we quashed the Aergan rebels, they wanted to end the fighting. The four thousand heroes and the rest of the army came home, Chaplain Dunaidh made King Eric accept our mercy, and it’s been peaceful ever since. There are a lot of Aerganites, but the Ildathach army is too strong, and things have been peaceful ever since. These days we’re the strongest city in Yvreathe. Probably on the entire continent”

Pride buoys every word. A sailor calls out a boisterous joke near the bowsprit, and is rewarded with a snickering chorus from her shipmates. I choose my next sentence with care. “Have you ever seen an Aerganite in Ildathach?”

Íde frowns. “I beg your pardon?”

“When was the last time you saw someone from the Aergan? Did you have any classmates in Saint Listless’ College from the plains?”

“Well… when I was younger, I had two or three Aerganite classmates in the Ragged School. And obviously you see Aerganites in the city. I mean, you’re in the city.”

“It’s been five years since the end of the war. There are probably four times as many people in the Aergan than in Ildathach and all the ouncelands surrounding her. Surely enough time for more Aerganites to make their way to the city. So where are they?”

“They’re,” she waves her free hand, shirt cuff catching the saltwater spindrift. “Not. Uh. They’re not interested, in. You know.”

She winds down her sentence after she meets my eye. I gently cut her off.

“Llancreg is on the border. Right on top of the Dolerite Rag that separates the Aergan from the east of Yvreathe. So most Aerganites who visit Ildathach come through our territory. A lot of them go further east, to the city. And a lot come back, the same way.

“You know what Ildathach used to do to Aergan renegades? Before the war? Do you know what crucibling is?” She probably does, but I keep going anyway. “You have a sigilist make a quick-burning fire charm, mount it on top of an iron crown, and place it on a prisoner’s head. Then you activate it.”

I saw a crucibling once, as a child. A favourite tool of the Dunaidh family, echoing their livery and the literal smelting of the last king of Ildathach’s crown. The justice of the city, meted out on a minor noble of the Aergan. The rebelling Aerganite was my mother’s long-distant kin, but I had never met him before. There wasn’t even any screaming. Just a flash, a heartbeat blast of heat and sound, the soft thud of the halo landing on a pile of smouldering ash. His charred forearms and hands were the only parts of him left, save the rising plume of corpse-ash, and the Ildathach Constabulary had left them for his weeping family to recover. My mother had boiled with anger, for weeks, but never, ever spoke about it.

Íde frowns, then whips out a response, her pride fuelling her anger. “But what did the Aerganites do to start the war? Nailed Ildathach families to trees! You can’t honestly say that you support that, that, that savagery. And also,” she spews out the next point without hesitation, because she’s just thought of it, “why fight for Ildathach, if you hate the city so much?”

The Aergan clans that murdered and mutilated their Ildathach administrators wouldn’t have used nails when they impaled those men and women to trees. That amount of iron would be worth too much to the more distant clans. I decide not to correct her, on that.

“Ildathach doesn’t like competition. Llancreg is an ounceland, and we’ve sworn fealty to the city since before the Dunaidh family took over. The city hasn’t really lost a fight in over a century, since the Tecuani and the Calamity. My deliverance to the army was part of that fealty, along with the spirals we pay in taxes. But we are one of just two ouncelands in the Aergan who are allowed to rule ourselves. No other Aerganite under Ildathach command has been allowed to rise up in social ranking enough to govern their own territories in two centuries. You ever wonder why the first thing the Aerganites did was murder every single Ildathach governor in the plains? That maybe there might have been a reason for the war beyond ‘savagery’?”

She doesn’t say anything. Drizzle patters gently on the planking.

“I’m not trying to be cruel. Ildathach demands peace. When it can, it enforces that peace upon its territories with extreme, focused violence. The army and the Constables and the Dour House and so on. But you know the Saint Gramarye scripture about empathy being more important than knowledge? He wasn’t wrong. Ildathach doesn’t care about the people in its territories. It cares about their loyalty, and it has a lot of practice dealing with dissent.

“The last time I was at Saint Listless’, I had the pleasure of attending a dinner hosted by the College, which invited a few veterans to join a discussion regarding the ‘Aergan problem’. One of the doctors argued against the thesis that a Major had presented, that Aerganites were simply too barbaric to be as productive as other Yvreathans.” Íde adopts a sympathetic frown as she listens. “Obviously I didn’t bring any attention to my own heritage, and most people can’t tell from my appearance, so his opinions were untethered from the politeness he’d adopt in mixed company. Anyway, the professor pointed out that it’s not necessarily that Aerganite culture is uneducated or barbaric. It’s that our Aerinic, our language, is wrong. That we don’t have enough words for rational concepts. That Aerinic is only good for myths, and is without useful knowledge, and is primarily used to generate fanciful legends and falsehoods.

“These are the people that are supposedly supporting Aerganites. The other half just wants to use the law and the military to kill anyone who dares disturb the peace of Ildathach. So that’s how the nicer strata of Ildathach sees us. We’re not barbaric animals, we simply don’t understand the benefits of science and civility, and need to be brought to heel. Like children. Small wonder you don’t see many of us in the city, where even our allies think we have to be herded and cared for. Most of my countrymen can’t even get work, save for the jobs that are dirty or dangerous enough that you don’t think about them.

“These ‘supporters’- they genuinely think they’re supporting us. But they’re the same people who call street urchins ‘throne dust’. Same people who gave medals to the casualties of the four thousand but left them to wither without purpose. We’re just not real, to them. That’s why they can explain us away in a sentence or two.”

She rubs her face with one hand, scrunching her eyes shut. A few days ago, I could’ve guessed what she’d say next. But since the bees and the honey in the Bloom, it’s like she’s a different person entirely.

“So you killed your own cousins.” She could’ve said it like an insult, but elects to drip it into the conversation like a lecturer would. “And now you have to live with it. That betrayal. But you had to do it, because of the agreements that your ancestors in Llancreg passed onto you.”

“Did I?”

The look she gives me is ancient, and piteous. I almost step back. A sailor marches behind us, bootsteps heavy on the planking. He thrusts his head between ours, breath stinking, and his oilskin poncho grinds damp sea-spray into my clothes when he throws his arms around us both.

“Alright, you two? Probably best to get below. Weather’s coming in.”

I turn, and see the great anvil clouds of an impending storm. The Gundog Walking rides a particularly dismal swell, and we retire to our cabin, where this conversation is too large and too heavy to fit. I am worried that Íde might be the type of person to take a disagreement personally, but in this respect she is much more similar to me than to Iseult. Within the hour I am teaching her to play back-gammon, and we team up to make fun of Iseult when she arrives and insists that the game is actually called tawleh. Our colleague, who is exactly the type of person to take this sort of ribbing seriously, is on the cusp of an angry sulk before we soften the raillery and invite her to play instead.

*

Our voyage is interrupted by neither monsters nor storms, and as the Gundog Walking wallows into Yvreathan territory, old Íde begins to re-emerge. It doesn’t bother me that Iseult keeps mostly to herself- at least with Iseult it’s expected. After our talk about the war, I was unable to pry any more conversations out of our young sigilist- by the second day, I had stopped annoying her with attempts at little amiable chats.

Her revitalisation doesn’t come courtesy of Iseult or me. A passing comment from Mate Morvyn had done it- some sailor’s complaint about the calculations of parallax and refraction that allowed our crew to calculate the ship’s location. A few hours later, Íde had emerged from the pilot’s cabin, beaming, and has since spent her hours with the ship’s navigators, discussing lunar distance and learning how to use a sextant. I know better than to meddle. I’m just happy to watch her become her old self again.

Days later, as we draw closer and closer to Ildathach, a crew of sailors lead by deckhand Haerviu break from their normal duties to deploy a huge, curving net behind the Gundog Walking. It does not appear to slow the ship at all, and they genially decline my attempts to help. This answers a question I had had since stepping foot on the ship the first time- why are we not eating fish all the time?

For whatever unknowable reason, our first voyage out involved no fishing at all. I know, because I was waiting for it. The entire trip, I half expected to see sailors on the deck with rods and tackle dotted about the deck, pulling food from the ocean daily. This never happened. Instead our fish rations were damp and putrid things, stored in a separate and uniquely vile fish room in the hold. Most of the sailors tended to pick only tentatively at these meals, and I heard dark murmurings on more than one occasion that eating the fish would cause all manner of diseases.

The net was cast behind us, and my interest was immediately peaked. I asked one of the sailors why we didn’t drag the thing behind us constantly, and she looked at me like I was particularly stupid. Apparently there aren’t actually that many fish in the deep ocean, which sounds utterly ridiculous. We’re supposed to wait until we’re at this specific zone, closer to shore, in a band just far enough from Ildathach to avoid average fishermen but close enough to expect a catch.

A few hours later, when the net is hauled back in, I’m staggered at the bounty. A fraction of the catch is immediately sent to the sickroom, via the loblolly boy, who flinches behind his great armfuls of still-flopping roundfish. The work pauses for a moment, and the sailors are concerned we’ve caught something unfortunate, but their anxiety bleeds into joy when a skate that must weigh over two hundred pounds is hauled into view above the waves. Their efforts redouble as they bring the massive catch, a colossus crowned in other, smaller fish, into view. It flops sadly from the net and is promptly clubbed to death by a brawny deckhand, who then carries its corpse downstairs, accompanied by a gaggle of assistant sailors.

Dinner that day is superb. Even the captain joins the rest of the crew in the galley, and with uncharacteristic praise declares the meal adequate. Much to my joy, and to the smirking satisfaction of several sailors on deck, Íde asks to continue her sword fighting lessons. She’s certainly less bashful about it than she was when we started.

We sight the Ildathach docks around seven in the evening, the sun still high above the horizon. Most of the ships are trading cogs like us, with a handful of pleasure craft speckled into the sea traffic. The only point of interest, which we drift quietly by on the way to the Grand Quay, is a bustling, gore-streaked brigantine. She’s overburdened by an immense haul that must take up a third of her entire deckspace- one great, hulking head, industriously being sawn in half by a pack of sailors wielding lumberjack tools. They look up and wave from their bloody work, and we float past them pleasantly despite the barrels of ichor that coat the other vessel, its crew, and the water around her. Íde pales at the sight. Iseult and I watch, arms crossed, as the sailors happily undergo their grim rendering of the monster. She turns to look at me, just for a moment, and I know what she’s thinking. The smell of iron. The impossible fountains of gore. Our time in the Aergan.

Everyone knows that every whale is different, so the monstrous cranium in front of me is familiar in only vague terms of bulk and outline. It is a titan, probably several dozen tonnes, and its skin is mostly a sort of oily, mottled black. Its blunt features, shaped like an enormous hammer and the length of four or five men, twitches and lolls as the whalers hack at its neck with machetes and tree saws. The crew moves with shoeless heron steps over the gut-wet deck. A handful are simply watching, hands curled around boarding pikes and spades, lest some parasite or sea-spawn erupt from the cooling flesh. The rest are working with an intense fervour, breaking the great corpse into two pieces, to be loaded off the ship by a rickety, blood-streaked crane.

Beside the vessel is the whale’s body, chained almost skin-to-hull with the ship that slew it. The colossal prize is easily the length of the ship, even after its decapitation. A contraption spooled out from the hull has been hooked deep into the leviathan’s flanks, and two crewmembers step walk over the rolling beast as great chunks of blubber are heaved slowly from its flanks. The whalers, each armed with pike-length spades, walk over the corpse like it’s a treadmill. Fat is quarried slowly from the body, pulled in rubbery ribbons. Some bulky contraption is used on deck to pack the ropes of fat and oil into the ship’s hold, and thick gouts of vile smoke pour from her chimneys, fuelling whatever industry is being conducted within her hull.

The whale’s face is strangely serene, considering the grisly operation that the sailors are enacting upon it. They pick its carcass apart, industrious crimson ants moving across and within the great shape. A great lolling tongue emerges snakelike from its open jaws: a good sign, what sailors call a ‘liar whale’. Its miniscule, goat-like eyes, black against the slightly lighter lustre of its skin, stare blankly off to either side of its colossal head. Like a butchered cow. Like a broken horse.

Judging from its size, the animal must be from beyond the Torment, from those frigid waters that gird the continent on all sides. Maybe the crew chased it through the frost wall, into the steadily colder seas, hunting the beast as it fled to the safety of those freezing depths. Maybe they barely retained the nerve to plunge into the Torment itself, risking frostbite or madness in the ocean past the storm halo.

No matter what sacrifices were made by the whaler, the worth of her prize is immense. Beyond the valuable coils of incarnagris that the whale is almost certainly carrying in its guts, the by-products of a catch this size are significant. Fat, meat, bones, eggs. Pearls, if they’re lucky. The captain, wherever he or she is, must be ecstatic. I scan the deck, but cannot see where the lucky captain might be. Indeed, I have spent so long staring at the great dead whale that I had not noticed the obvious hole where two of the ship’s whaling boats should be kept.

I can barely make out the name of the ship as we finally slide past her, aiming for a further dock. The words Lucky Lucky Potshot are barely visible beneath a river of blood that stains her signage scarlet. The whalers finish their surgery with a shout, and I turn just in time to see one of them stagger back, sprayed with a geyser of luminous cyan liquid. Some hidden fluid, pressurised within an obscured organ buried in the mountain of dead flesh. A hush takes the crew, who abruptly cease their singing and their labour and gawk at the stricken sailor. Iseult draws a breath through clenched teeth.

All whales are different.

The sailor flails horribly, and gives a single barking yelp of fear. We watch, transfixed, and wonder if she will be dissolved, or spontaneously frozen, or transmogrified into some insane grotesquery.

Nothing happens. The Gundog Walking glides serenely towards her allotted berth in the Grand Quay, and the splashed sailor is slowly obscured from my view by the gigantic bulk of the now-bisected whale. The nervous laughter from her decks, and the cheers from our own, let me know that nothing abhorrent has yet befallen the woman.

“It’s good that your Saints blessed the land and the waters of Yvreathe,” Iseult comments drily, when the water around our ship is no longer a swamp of salted gore. “Because I’m not convinced your people have done much good for either.”

“Why are they butchering it so close to the harbour?” There is no confidence in Íde’s trembling question.

“I don’t know,” I say, truthfully. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

“Because it cursed the ship,” spits a deckhand behind us, eyes flashing. “Sloppy work from the harpooners. Probably didn’t expect it to use knotwork against them. Captain’s probably belowdecks, puking up saltwater. Or cutting off his own fingers. Needs a strong knotworker to undo a whale’s curse.”

He looks over at Iseult, who stares at a whaler as he hacks at the leviathan’s twitching, blood-soaked tongue.

*

“What’s taking so long?” Iseult asks, impatiently. One of the deckhands looks at her strangely, then at me, then shrugs. The captain, however, heard the complaint. Everyone else on the deck is silent. Now that I think about it, on open water, with this level of quiet, it’s possible the inspectors heard us too.

First mate Ceinfryn has rowed out with a small compliment of sailors to meet with Ildathach’s dock inspectors. It’s quite unlike the experience we faced at Brixa Thalaam, where mooring the boat was more of a greeting than an actual inspection. Here, the sour-faced inspectors, scarcely fifteen yards from us and all clad in the thick green overcoats of the Ildathach Constabulary, are conducting a series of tense and bitter arguments with the first mate. Ceinfryn is now presenting a long list of documents from an oilskin folio, and flicks through the sheaves with practiced gestures. The captain behind us rumbles a response to Iseult’s complaint.

“They’re waiting for you to mature enough to be patient, Wraithwilder.”

Iseult spins irritably, but the captain doesn’t humour her at all. Even Iseult won’t clash with too solid a target without reason, and arguing with the captain is like staring into the sun.

Eventually, the first mate rows back, holding the folio aloft. I see she is also holding a letter, stamped with a Dunaidh family emblem- a throne turned to firewood. The sailors cheer. Even the captain smiles. There is a restrained pattering of movement from the sailors around us, and minutes later the Gundog Walking settles gently into a berth.

Stepping from the gangplank back onto the brickwork of the Grand Quay is a strange feeling. For some reason, the voyage out to Brixa Thalaam didn't particularly affect my constitution, beside the initial bouts of seasickness. The trip back, though, after our time within the Bloom, has inflicted a far more severe sort of malaise upon me. I step woozily onto the bricks of the Quay for a few moments to regain my footing, like my week away from the ground has made it reject me.

Iseult had immediately pushed to the front of our little group, and is the first of us off the boat. She looks like she's been struck with the same nausea I have, because she marches neatly down the gangway, walks about fifty feet in a straight line towards a wall, and then pirouettes and leans heavily against it. I follow her, and when I’m halfway to her I turn to see Íde disembark peacefully in my wake, held up by a gang of sailors who have shoved in front of her. She appears to be entirely immune to this disconcerting land-sickness.

Disembarking rapidly from the Gundog Walking proves to be unnecessary, because we still have to wait for the oleum to be unloaded. Were that the sole reason the ship went to Brixa Thalaam, the entire process might only take a few minutes. As it were, she has a significant quantity of cargo due for various Colt & Tumble warehouses. Sailors work tirelessly at the boat’s grinding capstan, unloading an unending stream of loot in the form of various boxes, crates, and barrels. Piles of the stuff are and carried overhead by a reinforced cargo crane.

The sailors, some of whom have already completed their portion of the complex thrashings of rope and muscle that stabilises a vessel like the Gundog Walking, are able to start help unloading the ship. A crew of longshoremen and dock workers, some of whom trade greetings and insults with the sailors, mill around the dock, waiting for their goods or for further instructions.

Thus, our personal cargo arrives half an hour later, nestled between a frankly bewildering away of Wraithwild freight. Our oleum, still in their original hazel boxes, shares a platform with caged, panicking pigs.

Unlike the brutal butchery of the whaler we floated by earlier, the ship’s contents are divided into a hundred smaller units, most of which are of varying dimensions and weights. The process of unloading is surprisingly complex, though there’s obviously a rhythm to it, and we wait patiently for the neat hazel boxes which contain our oleum. Five tonnes of the stuff, divided into a large number of straw-packed crates, are over several trips hoisted onto a lifting platform and deposited neatly on the docks. They join a growing mound of other cargoes, some of which is already being taken away by men and women in Colt & Tumble carts.

Íde makes a move to our boxes as soon as the swarm of workers moves away from it, but I put a hand on her shoulder to stop her. We watch, quietly, as the rest of the cargo is unloaded over the course of about an hour. Sailors heave coarse woven ropes, their back muscles straining under their skin. The cargo platform sways in the afternoon breeze, placing goods in a convoluted but undeniably efficient pattern. It is exhausting work, and only when the last of the cargo is cleared from the Gundog Walking’s excavated hold do the smiles start, and the sailors aboard the ship begin singing. The crew on shore joins in, those with tasks to perform doing so under their breath or through gritted teeth. When the job seems nearly complete, first mate Ceinfryn appears near the bowsprit with some bagpipes and accompanies the singing with a Caronek shanty, much to the amusement of the workers around us.

After the last of the crates have been hoisted, and the cargo platform returned to its berth, Captain Holofernes nods to her first mate (who is halfway through a spirited dancing song, but hurriedly winds down as the captain leaves the ship) and descends down to the docks as well. She scans the cargo, occasionally running a hand over a crate and barking an order to whoever is standing near her. At one point, the dockworker in charge of a shipment begins to argue with her, and she simply grinds him down in three loud, incomprehensible sentences. He chooses, perhaps wisely, not to challenge her, and wanders off to salve his pride and inflict some proportionate retribution upon his underlings.

She seems satisfied until she comes across our cargo, whereupon her head snaps up to us and she makes meaningful eye contact. A heartbeat passes, and I realise that she is not going to come to us. I peel myself away from the wall, leaving Iseult and Íde behind.

"Sir Whelan," that unblinking, needlessly potent stare. I'm fine with it. Well. Mostly fine.

"I trust that you will be able to take this cargo to its," and she taps the nameplate of the crate with a pair of rough fingers, "rightful destination?" I make a show of peering at the address, though I have read it so many times I have memorised it. The address had already been etched into a thin layer of iron that was nailed to each crate, engraved into the metal with the careful script of a foreigner writing in the Irdcheol alphabet.

I place my hand confidently on the thigh-high box. "We'll take care of it. I think those are for us." Here I nod my head at the quintet of carts lurking in the shade of the docks, three bored drivers talking to each other beneath the brickwork and a simple cloth canopy.

"You'd think right. It was a pleasure working with you, Sir Whelan. We'll see each other again."

Honestly, I expected a more titanically vulgar farewell, but I am absolutely not going to test my luck by pointing that out. We shake hands, and that is that. Our drivers seem unhappy to be asked to work after hours of idle waiting, but soon enough we are loaded and headed to the Colt & Tumble address. Originally they had requested that we take separate cabs to the site, but it was cheaper and easier simply to bribe them to let us sit in the back. They’ll have to return to the Grand Quay anyway, and only about a third of the total load of oleum fits in these carts. Iseult swings lithely into the first open cart, but I grab Íde and pull her to the last wagon in the queue. She grins when she realises why: this redolent cart is the one that’s been packed with the coffee beans.

When we finally trundle out of the docks, the street dogs watch us without stirring, too lazy even to bark. Just before we exit Jejune, we are delayed by a platoon of green-coated Constables. Ugly forms under their green coats betray barely-concealed weapons. I ask the driver what the hold-up is- he turns to look at me levelly, and doesn’t bother responding.

Our little one-sided chat is immediately interrupted by Íde, who makes a surprised sort of squawk as a flock of pigeons erupts suddenly by her place in the wagon. She laughs, sheepishly, and the carts start moving again only a minute or two later.

*

I wasn't at all expecting Evin to actually be present at the warehouse, and when I feel his bearlike hand wrap itself around my shoulder I startle.

He definitely felt that, so to save face I turn it into a show, and hold my hand up to my heart after spinning theatrically on one heel.

"Evin Tumble!" I announce, with the brightest timbre I can manage.

His handsome face is almost manic with friendliness. Those coffin-coloured eyes bore into me.

"Sean Whelan!"

"Evin... Tumble." I shake his free hand with my own, and match his wide smile. No fat, wet handshake from him. The shoulder-rattling strength of a professional socialite.

Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure why I’m bothering to play this out. He knows what I'm doing, with the pathological friendliness. I know what he's doing, also with the pathological friendliness. Most importantly, I know that he knows, and vice versa, so this social preening solely for the benefit of the others. Íde, definitely. Iseult, maybe.

Perhaps also for his clerk, then, who until Evin made his appearance was performing her duties with the deliberate slowness of a worker who knows precisely the minimum speed she can operate at without getting into trouble.

Our smiles must be catching, because only Iseult has a neutral face. The clerk looks like she might actually sprain a muscle in her face with the sudden onset of cheerfulness.

"Iseult Morrin!” Evin continues. “And of course, the young Íde Ceallaigh... so good to finally meet you in person!"

Evin drops my hand and brings the full force of his personality to bear on Íde. His eyes dart momentarily to her scarred, honey-dyed hands. I forgot that the two of them have never actually been in the same room before. She looks so slight, against his brawn.

“It’s good to see you as well, Sir Evin,” Íde says, roughly halfway between timid and casual.

He laughs, from the gut.

"Sir Evin! It's got a nice ring to it. Just Evin will do, for now. Not all of us have," and here he taps me, firmly, on the upper arm. "Noble blood! Though I do like the thought. Sir. Evin. We can’t all be peers though. Not like our modest friend Sir Sean over here, eh! I bet that was a surprise, learning you were travelling with a proper Aergan baron!"

Well, there goes that secret. Inwardly I’m wincing. I purposefully look only at him, and give an affable smirk.

I’m listening for it, and I’m fairly certain I can hear the sound of Íde’s eyebrows reaching their maximum altitude, and a tiny plunk as her lips part in surprise.

Evin’s gaze drifts away from her and pans generally across the walls of the Colt & Tumble office. It’s a very tasteful place. Dark blues, dark woods, gold accents. The subtle wallpaper is a particularly nice touch, and the empty fireplace is done in that classical ironmongery that you don’t find in newer buildings. His head stops rotating at about a ninety degree angle to where he started, and he takes a moment to appreciate the Colt & Tumble seal, grey on black and massively oversized, which sits unframed between a pair of windows.

He snaps back into the conversation, his eyes reigniting with some of their normal lustre.

"I see here that you've delivered the oleum! Simply grand. To our humble employee here, Miss, Miss..." He squints meaningfully at the Colt & Tumble employee.

The clerk, who up until this point has simply been tangent to the discussion, stammers out her name in the form of a question: "M-McConnell?"

"Miss McConnell! Who will- now that she has tallied and checked the various weights, qualities, and other accoutrements that are of course essential to receiving precious goods such as these, and are doubtlessly part of the true lifeblood that keeps Colt & Tumble in the very highest, loftiest cohorts of Ildathach companies- now leave the room."

She does so, gratefully, at a scurry.

Evin nods, satisfied, once she closes the door. He claps once, jovially.

"Capital! Simply, simply capital. One step closer to cracking that that fucking moon in half.” His voice catches harshly, then thaws rapidly.

“Now, about your payment. It's-”

Iseult, for the first time, contributes to the conversation. "Yes?"

He pats his vest pockets theatrically. Evin removed his coat when he entered, and his vest is cut tightly across the musculature of his chest and back. If there’s a wallet in there, it must be exceptionally thin. "It's... ah, it must be... ah…"

I watch the thunderclouds start to descend upon Iseult's face.

Evin twitches suddenly, his movements animated and jerky. I can see the muscles strain against his dress shirt, and he taps the tabletop impatiently for a few heartbeats. Seemingly, he comes to the culmination of some internal debate, and begins rummaging through the drawers of the clerk's desk. Íde shifts, uncomfortably. Iseult’s anger is paused, at least for now, by this unexpected turn. One of his legs splays out as he tries to fold his frame down to reach the bottom parts of the desk; I can see the heel of his shoe has been worn down by half an inch at least.

"Must be in here somewhere, must be," he mutters under his breath. I don't say anything, and look away politely as he begins to paw through, then discard, the clerk's files. He hums a little ditty to Saint Anchor as he pillages his own employee’s desk. Documents and ledgers appear on her desk, haphazardly. Reports, written in neat columns, piled on top of each other. Folders, paperweights, a simple silver letter opener. Evin Tumble mutters darkly at a drawer, which appears to be stuck. I pointedly do not acknowledge this behaviour, though Iseult and Íde are both staring at him, appalled.

Evin curses, grunts, and there is a sound of cracking wood and the tinkle of what must be a delicate lock mechanism, now bouncing in pieces off of the wooden floorboards of the office. He gives a little harumph of triumph and draws several sable, oilskin sacks out of the desk.

"Ah! Ahah! Yes, indeed. Thank you for your time and effort, Miss Morrin and company. As promised, I have for you," He opens one of the bags, and rapidly counts a sheaf of bills. "Nine thousand spirals! As guaranteed by contract! Let none say that Colt & Tumble does not pay its contractors, eh!"

Iseult folds her arms.

"Mister Tumble. The amount is nineteen thousand spirals."

His demeanour changes, for this first time. A flicker of doubt careens across his face.

"Are you quite sure, madam?"

She nods. "I have the contract here."

"Ah! Well!" He recovers, "Of course! Nineteen thousand. You are quite right. Quite right."

Eventually, he extracts the remaining cash from the various oilskins that belonged to the clerk. None of us say anything as he hands Iseult a handful of notes and coins. She counts it, slowly and purposefully, and Evin is visibly anxious during the process. When she finishes, she shakes his hand.

"Thank you for the payment, Mister Tumble."

He grins ferociously.

"Thank you, Miss Morrin! Now, I have one more item to discuss with you."

She pauses from the task of placing the currency into various pouches upon and within her coat.

"Yes?"

"Things have become a bit more complex in the last three weeks, since I saw you." This is a minor understatement, if he's pillaging the petty cash reserves of his own accountants to pay us. "The oleum is, of course, a tremendous help. But we've been discussing things with the Wine Party. Not with all of them, of course. Just the ones we've hired as consultants. And they have some ideas that you may be able to assist with. The pay for your assistance now will be double what I just gave you, if you start tomorrow."

Iseult finishes sorting the notes and coins, which have now disappeared about her person. She folds her arms, and Evin continues.

"The work is in Ildathach this time! Don't worry. I'm not sending you back to the Wraithwild. Or," and he laughs a single, contemptuous note, "Cabochon. No, it's more in line with your usual work. Sigils. Knotwork. You know."

He looks at her, gestures vaguely towards the brooch that she's wearing, the one that she's had time to rework after her time in the wilderness. It shines gently on her chest, like a ruby. He returns his hand to the back of the chair beside him, seemingly disconnected from the rest of his body. It flitters across the wood gently, fingers flaring, picking out some unheard rhythm, some harpsichord flutter. His other hand remains in his pocket, and he remains in this reverie for long enough for an awkwardness to sprout within the room. A few seconds after it does he looks up, startled, and ceases his musings.

Evin sparks his hand from the chair back and again locks eyes with Íde. She looks away, bashfully, and the exchange sparks another monologue.

"It's not difficult! I promise. We can write a contract again, if you wish. Actually, I insist we do. All I'd like for you to do is meet our consultant. The Professor O’Tierney. Or, ex-professor. Sabbatical? I never understand this academic talk. Or the technical stuff. He’s been faced with some setbacks on the project. Meet the good professor, help him solve this problem, and the money is yours. He’s staying on Wine Party grounds. But he might not be working for them directly. Keeps going on in these letters about 'unusual knotwork' and can't explain it to me in simple language. But, I wrote back, ‘what about Iseult Morrin? You know what they say about her’."

Her face is entirely neutral. "No, what do they say about me?"

"They say, they say, you're, uh, you're good. Very good! Very good indeed."

Iseult does that thing she does, where she stares at someone and tries to make them talk again. I hope she realises that that procedure doesn't work on a man like Evin Tumble, who could gladly fill the rest of the year with an uninterrupted monologue.

"Alright. We'll do it."

He looks almost as surprised at her response as I am. "Oh! Grand! Marvelous! Of course! As if there was every any doubt. Well then, Miss Morrin. If you'd be so kind as to speak with the good professor. I believe you'll find him at this address."

He reaches out to the pile of documents that he's upended on the clerk’s desk, and snatches one at random. He slips a pencil out of his pocket, then scrutinises the notes on the front side. Shrugging, he turns the piece of paper over and scrawls out what is presumably an address in a rapid, scurrying sort of script. He folds the paper and passes it to Iseult.

"And with that! Ladies! Gentleman," and I catch his twinkling smile, "I will bid you farewell. Lots of things to keep up with, lots of things. Do let me know if you can help with the professor. He does have so many ideas, and I understand about, oh, none of them. Good writer though. Tremendous stuff."

With that, and with a flourish as he picks up the coat he's hung on the stand beside the door, he leaves the room.

We all share a look. Iseult takes a miniscule notebook from one of her chest pockets, and unfolds the address that Tumble has provided her. She stares at it for a few seconds, then reproduces it inside of her own journal. I can see that he’s written just two words. With that, she unfolds the original note and places it back on the pile of detritus that Evin has built on the clerk's desk.

I clear my throat. "Perhaps we should depart."

The three of us shuffle awkwardly out of the room. Íde looks at the sad pile of documents on the desk once, piteously, before I usher her out and shut the door gently behind us.

Just as we’re leaving the warehouse, just as we make it under the solid doorframe of the Colt & Tumble doors, we hear a haunted, barely muffled shriek erupt from somewhere above and behind us. The clerk discovering her workplace. We leave the warehouse briskly, turning neatly into an intersecting street, then another, passing ragged tents that have been propped against a panoply of mismatched wooden buildings.

We’re far enough from the warehouse, and the potentially homicidal rage of clerk McConnell, that we can pause. Just as we’re about to stop, Iseult points at a slick of horse dung that Íde is about to step on, and she freezes mid-step. I offer my hand, and Íde stares at me with a look that is a few steps between incredulity and veneration.

“You didn’t tell me you were a baron.”

I look at the flimsy blanket-tents nearby, wondering who in the street is listening. Iseult smirks and looks behind us, scanning just in case the clerk has somehow managed to track us. It doesn’t seem likely. But you can never tell with some people, and today I’d rather not be stabbed by a furious, pencil-wielding accountant. As to Íde’s wonder, Evin has outed me, so I suppose there’s no point in keeping it quiet now. “I’m the son of Cónán and Luella Whelan, of Llancreg. My sister is the current baroness Whelan. Which means yes. I’m a baron. Although I have not been back since,” the war. I haven’t been back since the war. “Since, since, some time.”

She stares at me with a growing expression of awe. “I’ve never met a baron before.”

“Please, don’t.” It would be best to stamp this down. “There’s a reason why it hasn’t come up.” I look over at Iseult, fumbling for help, but she’s busy enjoying the exchange. “It doesn’t change anything.”

Íde nods, agreeable, obviously not convinced. “Okay. Wow. Nothing has changed. I won’t bring it up. But also- if you’re a baron, why…“ she sees my expression. “Okay, yes. Doesn’t change anything. If Ailín and Fionn knew…”

I don’t mention anything about her not telling her brothers, because it almost certainly will make no difference. We walk on in complete silence for ten more minutes. Íde seems like she’s about to actually detonate with questions.

Our path takes us to a brick bridge I’ve never seen before, one of the many that crosses the old ground-level sewage canals that eventually feed into the Ilda. The Chaplain has promised that by this time next year, the entire city would be raised, and the sewers would run under, rather than through, the streets. Iseult moves to cross the bridge, then stops, foot hanging just above the stonework. She turns at looks at both of us.

“I don’t trust Tumble.”

Unsurprising. Iseult doesn’t trust anyone. I shrug, then respond. “Why not?”

“Because he’s either unhinged or hiding something. He’s barely pretending to be polite. He wants this too much.”

He is undoubtedly hiding something. I’ve rubbed shoulders with his sort before: we revolve through the same social circles, after all. I stare at the brackish water of this little canal, at its rainbow sheen of effluent. “Being a little unusual isn’t a crime. You’re right, though. I have no doubt he’s hiding something. Everyone is hiding something.”

Íde doesn’t say anything. Iseult ignores her anyway. “So you don’t trust him either?”

I shake my head. “I don’t distrust him, if that’s what you’re asking. I’ve met a hundred Tumbles before, here and there, over the years. He’s strange, he’s driven. But he doesn’t seem like he’s actively trying to trick us. And for the amount of money that he’s just offered you, I think a little bit of eccentricity can be tolerated.”

Iseult rolls her eyes. “Yes, it would be far too uncouth to let madness interfere with revenue.” She wheels to Íde, hunting for an ally.

The younger sigilist speaks quietly. “I’m not sure. He does seem strange. But not stranger than most. I’ve met odder professors.”

Thus rebuffed on two fronts, Iseult grimaces, turns, and crosses the bridge. It’s hard to tell with Iseult’s suspicions, because she’s distrustful of everyone, all the time. Misanthropy isn’t my default state, and while Tumble is certainly peculiar, I don’t think he’s necessarily malicious. I mull her point as we walk further and further, eventually bidding both of them farewell and peeling away to walk home.