The Past the Trap
The truth of Nibet is that the Enalin tried negotiation.
They ceded it to the Hierarchs in return for peace, much the way our Arike cities were invaded by soft words and lying offers of self-governance.
What happened next is sometimes attributed to a misunderstanding in the terms the Hierarchs offered, a mistranslation, but that is just one of the many myths that surround this time.
The Enalin thought the Hierarchs wanted Nibet for its beauty.
The Hierarchs wanted Nibet to make a show of what would happen to those who thwarted their desires.
—Letter from Bashasa bar Calis, in the Old Palace Prince-heirs’ Archive at Benais-arik
As the sun rose into a cloudy gray sky, Tahren went to rejoin the patrol, and Kai and Ziede went to the supply train camp to consult with the other Witches.
Wrapped in a long gray jacket that Kai was fairly sure belonged to Tahren, Ziede said glumly, “We had a library at the Mountain Cloisters that—” She cut herself off. “Well, never mind that now.”
Kai didn’t need to ask what had happened to the library when the Hierarchs had taken the Khalin Islands.
They spent the long morning with Amabel and their family, sharing a breakfast of lentil porridge, then working to make a list of cantrips that would best affect demons.
Kai described the ones that had almost worked on him, and how he had defended himself.
Mother Hiraga and the others tried to identify the precise cantrips.
There were three they were sure of, and Kai practiced them carefully.
It was helpful, though of those here, only Amabel, Ibel, and Baram actually had the power to make cantrips like these work.
And of that group, only Amabel was fast and strong enough that Kai would even consider sending them into battle against a demon.
Sitting on a battered grass mat outside the tent, Kai watched Ziede and the others sign rapidly in Witchspeak and scratch notes on fragments of scavenged paper.
Raihar and the two older rescued mortals hadn’t emerged from their tent, and Arkat, the hostage who was nearly catatonic, was still being cared for by the Physicians.
Cimeri had come out to sit with the other Witches, and become absorbed in the task.
Her and Raihar’s children were playing a game with Kreat a little distance away, something involving a diagram sketched in the dirt and pebbles, which Kreat was apparently playing in a way that made them laugh.
They hadn’t let them mix with the other refugee children in the supply train yet, as they were still getting used to their new surroundings.
When the drovers over at the next camp dropped a tool they were using on a bent wheel, the two children scattered, ending up hiding behind Ziede in a huddle.
While Cimeri comforted them, Kai made little stacks of his welcome tokens and worried.
He couldn’t see how this was going to work.
Watching the preparations going on among the soldiers and the officers, he felt the whole encampment was shifting into the mental space they had occupied in the Summer Halls—that the plan was hopeless but they were going to do it anyway, because the consequences of not doing it were worse.
He didn’t think the luck they had had in the Summer Halls was going to repeat itself. Worse, he didn’t think Bashasa thought so either.
“Fourth Prince!”
Kai swept his tokens back into his coat pocket and looked up as Cerala approached. She crouched beside him and said in a low voice, “There’s a dustwitch in the field outside the paddock gate. It’s the young one that we let go before.”
Kai caught Ziede’s eye and told Cerala, “We’ll go. Can you send for Tahren?”
It was Hawkmoth, stalking back and forth in the field about fifty paces from the paddock perimeter, wringing her hands.
Kai leaned on the half gate that still stretched across the opening in the crumbling wall, propping his chin in his hand. “Well, what do we think this is?”
Soldiers and a few vanguarders gathered along the wall, watchful and wary, and the whole encampment had been alerted in case this was a distraction for an attack. Arms folded, Tahren watched the young dustwitch critically. “It could be a trap, obviously. But she looks … distressed.”
Kai snorted. “You were going to say ‘deranged.’”
“I was not,” Tahren corrected.
“I’ll say it, she looks deranged.” Ziede frowned. “Did that naive child strike you as able to lie with her body like this?”
Kai agreed that she hadn’t. Hawkmoth had struck him as someone who was thought of as disposable, someone the Doyen would send off on a task and not care overmuch if they didn’t come back.
“As much as I distrust these people,” Amabel said, reluctance heavy in their voice. “I don’t think this is a trap.”
“No, probably not,” Kai conceded. “I’ll go see. Alone,” he added, as Amabel reached for the gate latch.
Tahren lifted a doubtful brow. “That’s unnecessary. They’ve attacked you once already when they came to supposedly talk.”
“No, it’s fine.” Ziede’s mouth was set in an ironic line. “We’ll just stand here and watch.”
“You do that,” Kai said, knowing that if he needed her she would be there in a heartbeat.
Kai swung over the gate and walked out into the tall grass. Hawkmoth’s erratic presence had driven off the birds that fed on the flower seeds and insects; the only other thing that moved in the field were the gray-green grasshoppers, flitting away from Kai’s feet.
At his approach, Hawkmoth looked up. Her face flushed with emotion and she started forward.
Kai reached for the first intention on the shoulder of his coat.
Working fast, he had put together two designs, one fairly mild if Hawkmoth attacked him alone, and one considerably more violent if she had help.
But she stopped abruptly, recognizing the gesture.
Then she dropped to her knees in the grass.
Kai set his jaw. Saredi, and Witches, didn’t do that, and it just annoyed him all the more. He strode the last of the distance to reach her and snapped, “Get up!”
Hawkmoth shot to her feet, wide-eyed. “Demon—”
“Call me Fourth Prince.” Kai had realized at some point this morning that if he really was going to lead Witches, as bizarre as that seemed to Saredi sensibilities, he had to commit to it.
“Fourth Prince.” Hawkmoth corrected herself without hesitation, but then she was partly under the mental and emotional sway of a charismatic leader already, so she wasn’t exactly a good test of Kai’s leadership skill, what there was of it.
“We … we need help. I was sent to ask you. To beg you. Help us.”
That was not what Kai had expected to hear. Not that it didn’t smell of a trap. “Who sent you, the Doyen?”
“The Doyen is dead.” Hawkmoth shook her head, light hair flying. “Nightjar sent me.” There were tear tracks on her cheeks, he noticed now. “Almost everyone is … distraught, and wild with it. Worse than your cantrip that made everyone confused about which way was up or down.”
Kai huffed in disbelief. “That was an intention, not a cantrip, what are they teaching you that you don’t know the difference.
” If this was a lie, it was a better one than he would expect from the dustwitches.
It was exactly the stroke of luck that he and the others had hoped for and not expected to get.
He had told Nightjar the dustwitches could join them, and it must have been obvious that the possibility would make tempting bait in a trap.
He kept his voice dry and disbelieving and said, “Nightjar is so confused she thought I would care?”
Miserably, Hawkmoth said, “Nightjar killed the Doyen.”
Ziede flew toward the dustwitch camp, Kai’s arm tight in her grip.
Tahren, Amabel, and Kai’s cadre followed on horseback, but Ziede’s wind-devils easily outpaced them.
Kai couldn’t stop turning over all the possibilities.
If it was true, the insurmountable odds against attacking the fort would become a lot less insurmountable.
But that felt like too much optimism to be real.
“If Hawkmoth is lying,” he began, and Ziede cut him off with, “Unless you have a different way to finish that sentence than the last three times, please stop. We’ll know when we get there. ”
Kai forced himself to keep quiet. She was right, they would know soon enough.
They reached the curving ridge that sheltered the camp and Ziede slowed cautiously. The day was still cloudy but there was really nothing to hide them up here. Kai had suggested a chimera but Ziede thought it would be a waste of time when the dustwitches were already expecting them.
As Ziede skirted the ridge to allow them a glimpse down into the camp, Kai saw it was in disarray. No woodsmoke, a couple of tents knocked down, and he could hear … “Wailing,” he whispered to Ziede. Pain-filled, heartbroken wailing and sobbing.
“Mourning?” Ziede wondered, and took them around and down to the lower entrance by the spring. “The connection the Doyen had with them, broken abruptly … Even if they didn’t care for her in their true hearts, it would hurt.”
There was no sentry this time under the twisted shade trees, just some of the riding beasts, grazing peacefully on the other side of the spring.
Not quite as many as there had been before.
Either the dustwitches hadn’t been able to recapture all of them after Kai and Cimeri had driven off the herd during the raid, or some members of the group had taken some and left.
Ziede’s wind-devils set them down gently and swept once around her, restless. For Kai it was like being brushed by clouds of wind-driven ice, and strangely reassuring. He started up the trail, Ziede following, the dirt churned by so many running footsteps it was like climbing a sand hill.