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  Even so, Rurik could not say his lord had made a poor decision. The army didn’t have the heart for another winter siege, and in spite of their proximity to their enemy’s heart the winter months had been largely quiet. Aside from a few skirmishes with raiders, neither their scouts, nor those locals in their employ, had seen any sign of the battered Effisian army.

  Rurik took it as a blessing. He had seen enough of the bloodshed—its lilting ring still terrorized the occasional dream.

  As he marked the last tally in his head, he felt the unsettling sensation on the back of his neck of being watched. He sighed, “Stop it, Voren,” and turned wearily toward the pale brown eyes squinting out at him from the door flap. The skinny baker snorted, snatched up a loaf of bread from one of the tables, and let the echoing pound of his footsteps carry him out of the tent.

  That seemed to be the extent of their conversations these days. Since the…incident with Essa, their one-time associate always seemed to be lurking or scowling about. Whenever he wasn’t coddling the girl that was to say. It was an added little dagger in Rurik’s heart whenever he spied them together. Ever-watchful, the scrawny baker always seemed to have a smile ready for just those moments.

  But there was nothing he could do about that. For all his efforts, if there was one thing he took away from his father, it was that one couldn’t change the past. And he had muddled that up enough. Sometimes, as he sat alone, Rurik tried to remember the little things—the scent of her hair, the warmth of a kiss. It agonized him every time those senses failed him.

  Tying up the last of the bags, Rurik called the guards posted outside, and together with them, hastened into the crowded lanes of the camp. It was much reduced from that brightly-colored mass the exile had first beheld at Erkitz, but it was still enough to dizzy a man. Though many soldiers had been moved into the town itself, thousands of idle, homesick, and restless armed men remained trapped within canvas walls. They grouped around the fires and roved anxiously about the paths patrols had worn, but the whole place buzzed in a way that always left Rurik unsettled. He did not like to spend much time there.

  Passing between its wooden gates, they started into the streets of quaint Pasłówska. The town was about what one could expect from such a place. When he breathed in, frost mingled with manure. Cobbled streets clacked beneath their feet, but it still had the air of a farmers market. For miles beyond the town’s walls, farms were all the eye could see. Any number of hamlets catered to the same folk, but Pasłówska was simply the biggest gathering place for such people so near to the Effisians’ capital. Even with soldiers roving the streets, its people came and went as they always had, albeit a bit more warily. More than a few shot uncertain or spiteful looks at the troupe as they hurried along.

  Low moans ran as undercurrent in the air as they rounded Pasłówska’s only church. Rurik winced away. Within the dome of its low stone walls, the Bastard had turned the holy structure into one of several makeshift homes for the army’s doctors. They treated the townsfolk with the same candor as the soldiers, but all they seemed to take anymore were cases of disease. Mostly the Bloody Flux. Even so, Rurik found himself pawing at the arm a knight’s mace had broken in the field. The place was a reminder he didn’t need. Still cradled in its sling, his arm’s throbbing always seemed worst in the damp mornings.

  The first day after Leitzen remained a blur. A different sort of battle, he supposed. Rowan told him later that he had nearly lost the arm. It was only Alviss, their towering Kuric guardian, that had politely persuaded the doctors the quickest course was not always the best, and that his arm wasn’t as bad as all that.

  Rurik himself had spent most the day asleep, feverish and out of wits. Flashes would come to him, of people and words, and cries for water, but that was all. Men danced from flames, leaving only hollow eyes in their ash. He saw Essa’s face, contorted in fear, leaning over him with her green-green eyes leaking tears, but then it was gone. He couldn’t say if either were real. Sometimes, a voice called to him in whispers, and seemed to stir the shape of his visions, but he could never recall it when he woke. He hoped the sound was Essa.

  By the time he came around, she was gone, and as distant as ever. He had known her since they were children, and she wouldn’t even speak to him. Every time she looked at him, all he ever saw in her was horror. All she ever saw in him was a monster.

  A monster he had not created.

  In that time beyond knowing, when they had coupled in the night and Essa did not know who she was.

  His brother Ivon called to him as they neared the mayoral estate, which the Bastard had taken for his own. The troupe halted at the call, and Rurik cast back down the street, watching his brother stride toward him, his regular train of sycophants in tow. In truth, they were one of the few signs of the man he had known months before. Though the voice was the same, and the motions behind them, the long black warrior’s tail of his brother’s hair had been lopped off in mourning—a tradition older than the Empire itself. Oddly—and hauntingly—it made him look even more like their father. Yet he was thinner than he once had been, and all his clothes stank of the same overuse as everyone else. In war, even nobles were not excepted from hardship.

  They clasped arms, awkwardly, and stepped apart. Ivon’s eyes roamed him as they always did, as though sizing him up—or searching for a sibling somewhere in Rurik’s pitiful mask. At his side, Ivon’s latest page kept glancing between them, smiling broadly, stupidly. Even so, he looked sturdier than the last had been. Even before the Bloody Flux took him.

  “How may I be of assistance, brother?” Rurik asked, his manner emphasizing urgency. He glanced over his shoulder, toward the hall, and back. “Tessel will be needing me shortly.”

  Wolfish. That was how his brother’s smiles always looked. “I have no doubt. Merely passing along a kind word. Alviss sought you at the dawning. I gave promise to set you his way.”

  “Alviss?” Rurik could not keep hopefulness from warming his voice. “What did he want?”

  Ivon shrugged. “Same as ever, I would suppose. He left no message.”

  “I see.” He shifted, licking his lips. He wanted to ask, but could not find the courage. Besides, he doubted his brother would have the answer he sought. More tribulations to stack his morning with. Instead, “Any sign of forage?”

  “Same as ever. War and winter leave little to pluck.”

  “I see.” Rurik repeated. Hemmed and hawed and thought of asking after the other missing link. The hunger more ravenous than even food: coin. His eyes wandered to his brother’s hunched shadow, the Brickheart—Vardick, his father’s captain of the guard, now his brother’s man wholly—and lingered over the scars and the gnarled fingers on the hilt of a sword, and wondered if he didn’t miss his pupil, and those long nights thwacking Rurik in the gloom of winter. Then his eyes crossed the man’s dead-set own and he ceased to wonder.

  Thinking of nothing else to add, he smiled his sweetest smile and dipped his head to his brother. “I’ll let Tessel know.”

  “Go serve your lord, lad.”

  Your lord. Much was to be made of specificity. They parted ways, each striding their own lane through the town. Many shared his brother’s views on their newfound commander. An upstart. A brash fool. Tessel. The bastard saint of common men and common dreams, revered for his prowess and loathed for the birth no man could change.

  To Rurik, he was simply Tessel.

  The guards lazily admitted them at the door. Rurik parted ways with his guardians then and wheedled his way down a vacant entrance hall. In that hall, soldiers out of garb milled about, having turned the place from reception area into their personal barracks. The youth paused there to rub some of the pain from his bundled arm. He gasped and bit it back, trying not to appear out of sorts among the settled soldiers.

  But of course, he was. He smiled at them, trying to play it off like some childish game. A few nodded. Most continued their conversations or their light meals. Pain they understood. It was th
e exile in him they didn’t trust. Deserter, their looks seemed to say. Traitorkin.

  From among them, however, a blond head bobbed toward him, only to rise a moment later. Boderoy was one of the Bastard’s attendants, as he had attended the Emperor before him. Whereas most of the Emperor’s company had departed with his body, Boderoy, out of some odd sense of devotion, had chosen to remain. The man had all of the grace one might expect from such a creature, though his sharp eyes and robust limbs told of a man far from unfamiliar with a good tussle. Rurik guessed him at about thirty summers. Of an age with their bastard. His mannerisms often painted him far younger, though.

  “Where is he,” Rurik asked as the man drew near.

  Smilingly, Boderoy led him through an adjacent hall to the house’s sitting room. There he knocked once and called out their presence, waiting for a reply before admitting him. When the Bastard’s gravelly voice beckoned, Rurik stepped inside. The door clacked shut behind him.

  Kyler Tessel was in rare form. The man his soldiers called the Bastard sat alone. He hunched over the room’s small table, scribbling ink across a parchment, heedless of how much smeared the others beneath it.

  Tessel looked remarkably like his late father must have when he was of that age. Tall and slender—in the lean and agile way of warriors, rather than boys—with the grassy green Durvalle eyes that looked at a man, as a man, and guaranteed none could second guess his birthright. His curled brown hair was trimmed short, which only seemed to emphasize his long, predatory nose. His features, Rurik marveled, were fine, and war only seemed to chisel them further into refinement, rather than weariness. He dressed simply, for his air alone commanded obedience. Like the alpha in a pack of wolves.

  He scarcely glanced up as Rurik entered, but Rurik could feel the sigh of contentment at his presence. Tessel was rarely alone and he liked it that way.

  “Were I meant for solitude,” the commander had once confided in Rurik, “I should have been born an owl. A man is nothing without others to share life with.”

  Yet he was undeniably alone. They both were. The Bastard and the exile. Fate had pressed the one apart from his fellow man by blood, and chance had stolen the other away with the blood of a cold woman.

  Rurik lingered in the doorway until Tessel gestured him into a chair across from him. “Sit,” the man bade, and the exile obeyed, sitting up straight and steady. While he waited for his lord to speak, he found his eyes roaming the bits of parchment spread before him. The one being signed was addressed to Huwcyn, Count Ibin’s nephew, and from what language Rurik glimpsed, their commander was none too pleased. Another looked to be a petition from the town’s council. It would hardly be the first.

  Curious, Rurik thought, to surrender one moment, and demand so heartily in the next…

  It would be neglected, he decided. Such things often were. For Tessel, the army always came first.

  After silence stretched long enough to make it apparent Rurik wouldn’t speak, Tessel, still not looking up from his scribbling, grunted, “Must you always be so dreadfully formal, lad? Speak. Speak!” He paused there, his quill faltering long enough to leave a growing stain on his signature. “Unless I come to suspect bad word. It is not bad, is it?”

  Grimacing, Rurik tried to ease some of the tension from his shoulders. “Well, it’s not good.”

  Tessel considered that a moment, then shrugged back into his writing. “If it were good you shouldn’t have been sent at all.”

  “I suppose.”

  “How much is missing?”

  “A whole sack of our tasteless bread and about a quarter pound of the frostbit cheese.”

  “A pity.”

  Sprinkling a touch of dust onto the ink to help it dry faster, Tessel at last eased back in his seat, though not without a sigh. Setting the quill aside, he shook out his right hand. The scraggly scar across the palm—earned by the curious curvature of a kris dagger, Rurik was told—always bothered him after extended use. Most would never know it, though.

  “And where do we stand?”

  “Well…” Rurik cleared his throat, uncertain of how to say it. As the Effisian mayor was all too keen on lecturing him: he who speaks truth had best be swift of foot. “If we cut rations again, we should have enough for another two octaves. Maybe three.” His own stomach growled at the prospect. Half-rations were already the order of the day.

  If the idea phased the general, Tessel didn’t show it. “With luck, one of the trains will break through by then.” The barest wisp of a smile curled the edges of his thin lips. “And with luck, our betters won’t break us by then.”

  Their betters, as Tessel liked to call them, were the nobles at the heart of his army. His generals. The supposed voices of his whims. Men like Ivon, and men much higher. While their soldiers might have had much love for Tessel, the nobles did not. A bastard, even a royal bastard, was nothing to blooded men.

  There had always been a certain tension to the air from the very moment the Emperor called up his levies. Armies did not march in winter, and for good reason. Preparation aside, an army inevitably outran its supply trains and a winter army could scarcely forage for supplements. Starvation, and the diseases it brought with it, was a greater killer than swords ever were.

  Things bards never sang about. Things Rurik had only lately learned.

  Trouble had bloomed in earnest with the Emperor’s death, however. After Leitzen, there was a split. In spite of his incompetence in the months leading up to their march, many turned to Lord Marshall Othmann as their commander, and he, for one, advocated cutting loose the majority of their levies for the remainder of the winter months. Small forces would be left to hold their earnings and the rest could return with the thaw.

  Through the window, he saw a man bellowing from the stocks. Though the words were lost, their gist was easily deciphered. Across from him, another pair wriggled against the same fate. Had they been back home, people would have hurled fruit at them. Here, they could afford no such loss.

  Tessel caught him staring. “Do not mind the rabble, Rurik. More feuding.” He gave a dismissive flick of the wrist. “They will keep until morn.”

  Hoping to ease winter’s burden, Tessel had divided the army. Many of the nearly 10,000 souls Othmann had originally commanded were sent north, ostensibly to burn and pillage and link up with Idasian forces scouring the coast, while others were sent south, to likewise plunder their way through the countryside to a beleaguered General Ernseldt. The rest scattered in a choking semi-circle about the lands approaching the Effisian capital, but Tessel would not release a single man from duty.

  Men allowed the grace of home could scarce be expected to return, especially when the force of the call was in doubt.

  Meanwhile, the Lord Marshall and the Bastard clashed, and not always privately. As yet, the will of the latter prevailed. But the only thing shielding him was the promise of a dead man and the thin assurance of promises made to that same corpse.

  Rurik thought of the old man, wrinkled, pale, utterly ruined and fragile in death. No man could have looked less an emperor. More like a skeleton in armor. By now, he had probably reached Anscharde. He and the remnants of his guardsmen.

  “What of Ivon? What news does he bring of the lot?”

  “Would that I could say.”

  He thought of Ivon standing before him that morning and all the things that brothers might have said. Then—nothing. They shared a mother and a father. They no longer shared a name. For all the false smiles the man now showered him with, that fact always seemed to creep into the fore. When his brother looked on him, all Ivon saw was their father’s end. The coward that should have ended in his place. Rurik had no doubt Ivon was glad the Bastard had taken such an interest in him. So he didn’t have to.

  It only hurt when he thought about it.

  But his brother bloomed into brothers. His brothers spawned sisters. Sisters melded into wives, sons, daughters, and all that webbing of thoughts careened on the hand of a dead man, still
watching him, still judging him, through all those beckoning eyes.

  “Why did you come back?” he asked, in the dead of dreams.

  “Well,” Tessel ventured uneasily. “Men will what they will.” A trace of jurti: the art of saying nothing yet sounding grandiose in the same breath. Perhaps moved by the uncertainty in Rurik’s own eyes, though, the Bastard reached out and clapped him on the hand. “Besides, you’re the only noble blood I should ever need.”

  Three months ago, he hadn’t even known Rurik existed. In those days when blood still ruled day-to-day. Now, especially on Rurik’s darker days, things like this had become commonplace, as if to say: You are not just a part of something great. You belong, and this was more than he could ever hope.

  As he fumbled for a suitable reply, a knock on the door interrupted his thoughts.

  Tessel eased back from him and barked entrance. A messenger entered without hesitation, a note gripped tight between greasy fingers. At a time, when the old man sat in Tessel’s place, such a soul would have had to prostrate himself three times just to be given the right to speak.

  “A rider, ser,” the man said, offering the note with only the slightest inclination of his head. Bastards fell beyond the realms of the courts’ archaic jurti. “Bearing the Imperial Seal, and with word from the capital.”

  Both men perked considerably. Only inklings had crept in from Anscharde over these long months.

  Tessel reached out to take the message, but let it hang a moment, asking, “Didn’t come with food did he?” His tone was only half-serious, but the messenger gravely shook his head all the same. Tessel muttered a disappointed “of course” under his breath and promptly dismissed the messenger. The young man looked only too glad to go. Rurik decided to join him.

  Begging off by leave of matters to attend in camp, he rose to depart. Halfway to the door, however, Rurik was startled by the sound of Tessel’s voice.

  “Hold that thought, my friend.” The Bastard’s smile spread from ear to ear as his eyes leapt across the page. “Best say your vows. Our new emperor calls us home.”