Chapter IV
IV
It is hereby writ into law that every Honorian province must cede to the army a tithe in flesh: upon reaching the age of fourteen, each village must provide ten of its ready youths per annum—or half of those achieving their majority, whichever number be the greater—which young people are to be able in body and sound of mind, and handed over to the king’s impressment forces without resistance or delay.
Every town must provide a hundred or half, every city a thousand or half, and for those families living outside the bounds of such community, one youth or half.
—AN EDICT OF HARAXAS INVER
The road from Raea’s cloister to the capital, Inverlyn, was a long one, winding through the foothills, and fiercely hot in midsummer.
Though you could see the mountainside castle from the cloister by the sea, it disappeared from view for long stretches as the road led through sinuous valleys and shadowy woods.
But always, the castle reappeared, asserting its presence once more from that lofty perch midway up the mountain.
You’d be able to see all of the Solis Plains from up there, Fia thought.
She pressed an arm to her bound breasts for the thousandth time since leaving the cloister only half a day and a night past. They ached mercilessly, and the front of her bleached linen postulant’s kirtle was damp and sour-smelling.
If she’d grown feverish, she couldn’t tell—the weather alone had her slick with sweat.
Even the mule, complacent between her legs, frothed a little on the inclines, though it put its head down and carried on doggedly.
So they went, under the hot midsummer sun, toiling their way to where Orden Inver sat on his throne, keeping an eye on the plains.
Keeping an eye on the cloister. Fia fought the urge to duck her head as she rounded a final bend in the road and the castle and its surrounding city sprang suddenly into full view.
There was level upon level of it, spreading across the foothills.
As the city scrambled up the mountainside, it seemed to become of a piece with the landscape, half built of unforgiving gray stone, half hewn into the mountain itself.
Gardens grew on every terrace, spilling fragrant vines and errant flowers out onto the walls, but they made the place look no less forbidding.
Before the great gate that led into the first level of the city, Fia paused on the narrow road to look back. She caught her breath at the sight, and pressed an arm to her chest once more. This time it was her heart that pained her, though.
It was true. You could see everything from up here, where the king crouched on his mountain like a little god.
The musky green foothills rolled away, redolent with pines and cedars, to where the plains began.
The flatlands themselves were a patchwork of good earthen colors—browns and golds and paler greens than the conifer forests.
They were dotted with orchards and occasional pasture, but mostly sown to wheat and barley and oats.
All of inland Honoria and half the rest of the continent of the Hand ate through winter thanks to the Solis Plains, and Raea’s cloister stood as a proud testament to that—the only one of the goddesses’ great Honorian houses that had survived the Invers’ rise to power.
Past the plains, stretching far, far beyond knowledge, to the thin silver edge of the world, lay the sea.
Fia took another breath from where she sat on her patient mule’s back and let her eyes flutter shut.
She could almost imagine the cool of the cloister’s breezeways, fresh sea air blowing through their tall stone arches.
In her mind she walked there still, pacing up and down with Miriel in her arms, singing old harvest songs to the baby.
She liked the songs of earth and fruit and full fishing nets the best, Miriel did, the ones that had been sung since long before a king sat on the mountain.
Fia would sing them to her daughter and pray, for the fullness and plenty the songs spoke of.
For a return to the old ways, and a future where a king no longer governed Honoria, keeping them all locked in a succession of grueling wars.
Now here she waited on Orden Inver’s doorstep while a pair of bored guards scanned the unsealed letter Matria Dolenza had insisted she deliver to the queen.
How things had changed this last twelvemonth.
Sometimes Fia wondered if Raea, the Blessed Sun, really knew what she was about, or if she bothered to look down on the earth at all.
And yet. With the Matria of Raea’s cloister holding a soria’s position over her head, Fia would obey, whatever the cost, and no matter how nonsensical the order seemed.
She’d traveled all the road from the cloister to the castle with bitterness lodged like a splinter inside her, but she’d obeyed.
It was the only thing that consoled her, waiting on the king’s doorstep with her empty arms and painfully full breasts.
“Follow him,” one of the guards grunted, jerking his head in the direction of a small, spotty-faced page. Fia held out a hand wordlessly, waiting for her letter to be returned. After a moment, the guard surrendered it with a withering look.
The page led Fia and her long-suffering mule up, through level after level of stone houses and workshops and terrace gardens.
The whole place was busy and cramped, the narrow streets a tangle of vendors’ carts and livestock and shouting people, the crowds occasionally thinning out where there was room enough on the mountainside for a tiny open square.
Fia was used to busyness by now—Raea’s cloister was overrun by sweating farmers and tipsy, joyous celebrants on market days, or when a tall-masted trading ship anchored off the shore.
But it was an affable, cooperative sort of busyness.
There, only the tang of salt and the sound of song or deep-voiced bells lay beneath the babble of human voices.
Here, there was tension, and the smell of unwashed bodies and filth lying untended in the streets.
There was an edge to the conversations too—Fia overheard scraps of gossip and rumormongering as she passed, and nearly all of it centered on the coming war.
Unsurprisingly, but unnerving all the same, the people of Inverlyn seemed eager for a new conflict.
It was not so on the Solis Plains; there the merchants and farmers cherished peace and the well-ordered calm they enjoyed.
In the middle of a particularly crowded roadway, Fia and her escort were forced to a standstill by a throng of people gathered outside a building with garish crimson flowers spilling from every crack and terrace.
Above, on the balcony, a hard-bitten man in chain mail and furs lounged in full sun while several women in gauzy robes disported themselves around him.
Fia would have paid the scene little mind were it not for the odd, fixed attention of those gathered below.
“Has no one in this city ever seen women who earn their living through bedpost business?” she grumbled to the page. “Even my village had its doxy, and a kinder soul there never was, may the Three light her path.”
As she spoke, one of the women let out a small cry, and Fia’s attention arrowed back upward. The armored man had pulled one of his companions into his lap roughly. His hand was on her throat, and naked fear shone in the courtesan’s eyes.
Without thinking, Fia called out. “Badly done! Let her go.”
Muttering a curse, the man shoved the courtesan aside and rose to his feet. He placed both hands on the rail of the balcony and found Fia with his gaze. She sat straight and stubborn astride her mule, a small pocket of empty space around her, for anyone within arm’s length had drawn back.
“Would you like to join me instead?” the armored man asked.
His voice was strange and hoarse, like stone grinding against stone, and a gilded bear crest glinted on his shoulder.
The stranger looked at Fia with an animal sort of cunning, but it was not the first time she’d met such a gaze.
Half the men in the mountains were like that.
“You don’t want me,” Fia shot back, equally haughty, and just as fierce. Meeting strength with strength had always been her best defense—to show hesitation or weakness provided an invitation for ill-use. “I bite.”
The crowd kept utterly silent, as though waiting for something calamitous. The only sound was a sudden stomp from Fia’s mule, the impact of its steel shoe against cobblestones very loud in the fraught quiet.
“Then I will have to swallow you whole, before you can bare your fangs,” the armored man growled.
Fia shrugged. “I’d make a sour mouthful, and one liable to choke you on the way down.”
A whisper rose up in the street—a collective intake of breath.
Fia read nervousness in the postures of those nearest to her.
The armored man was someone of standing, then, who no one dared to offend.
But on the balcony, the stranger sensed the crowd’s anxiety too.
His eyes, like live coals on a dying hearth, held Fia’s for a moment more.
In them was the assurance that were the two of them alone, his actions would be very different.
It would be brute force meeting her now, rather than words.
Then the stranger raked the crowd with his sly gaze, threw his head back and laughed, a wild, ruinous sound.
“Honoria,” he said loudly after a moment. “What a marvelous country.”
There came a wave of answering laughter. All at once, the murmur of conversation rippled out again, and progress along the roadway resumed. Scraps of gossip followed Fia as she went.
“Now, he conducts himself like a proper warlord,” someone said.
“… reminds me of stories of Magnus Inver…”
“… don’t like our chances, not with seven years of the queen softening up the king.”
“… if he took the name and the faith, would it really be so bad?”