The spring called Ayn Zayra by the Jaludians lay in a shallow valley halfway between the Esberian siege lines and the walls of Solymer. Two ancient olive trees grew there, their trunks so gnarled and twisted that they seemed less like trees and more like old gods who had grown weary of standing upright and had decided, centuries ago, to sit down. Their leaves were silver-green in the first light of dawn, and the spring itself bubbled up from a cleft in the limestone, clear and cold, a thing so purely good that soldiers from both armies had, by unspoken agreement, never fought within sight of it. It was neutral ground, and it was sacred, though neither faith's holy books mentioned it by name. It was too exposed to hold, too sacred to foul, and both armies had learned that any man who drew steel there died by arrows from both sides. Some places earn their sanctity without the help of prophets.
King Rydric arrived first, with a guard of twenty knights hand-picked not for their ferocity but for their discipline. He had learned, over the course of a long and bloody reign, that a parley could turn into a massacre in the space of a single ill-timed insult, and he did not intend his epitaph to read "slain while discussing terms over a spring like a thirsty dog." Lord Baudren rode at his right hand, his scarred face set in an expression of profound suspicion. Nasir al-Jamil rode a little behind, his scholar's hands folded neatly on the pommel of his saddle, his dark eyes already scanning the far hillside for the first sign of the Sultan's approach.
"This is a trap," Baudren muttered, for the fourth time since they had broken camp.
"If it is a trap," Rydric replied, "then it is the most elaborate trap in the history of warfare. They sent us roast lamb to spring it."
"A man can be poisoned by kindness as surely as by hemlock."
"Then I shall die with a full belly, which is more than most of my soldiers can say. Enough, Baudren."
The Sultan's party appeared as the sun cleared the eastern ridge. They came down from the Azran Gate road in a column of white and green, their horses stepping delicately, their banners—long pennants of emerald silk embroidered with the seven-pointed star of the One Covenant—snapping in the dry wind. At their head rode Sultan Seylim ibn Tahir al-Din.
He was not what the Esberian lords had expected. They had heard tales, of course—the Sword of the Covenant, the Victor of the Northern Valleys, the man who had broken the armies of three kingdoms and driven the Vestimarians back to the sea—and they had imagined a giant, a monster, a creature of wrath in gilded armour. The man who dismounted beside the Spring of Two Olives was fifty years old and built like a scholar who had taken up walking for his health. He wore simple robes of undyed wool, a plain white turban wrapped about his head, and a curved dagger whose scabbard was unadorned by jewels. His beard was grey, close-trimmed, and his face was lined—not with cruelty, but with the particular exhaustion of a man who has carried the weight of an empire for too many years.
His guard, numbering perhaps fifteen, hung back at the base of the hill. He walked forward alone.
"The King of Esberia honours me," he said, in Jaludi. Nasir translated, his voice carrying clearly in the morning stillness.
"The Sultan of Al-Marwiyah does me the same honour," Rydric replied, and stepped forward to meet him.
They stood for a moment, not speaking, two men at the centre of a war that had consumed nations and drowned coastlines in blood, and each took the measure of the other. The spring burbled at their feet. The olive trees rustled in a breeze that smelled, faintly, of thyme.
Then Rydric spoke, and he did not bother with the formal courtesies that protocol demanded. The letters he had exchanged with the Sultan's court over the preceding days had been full of flowery salutations and invocations of divine favour. He was tired of flourishes.
"You can hold this city for years while we rot," he said. "You know it. I know it. Let us not pretend otherwise."
Nasir opened his mouth to translate, but Seylim raised a hand, and the interpreter fell silent. The Sultan studied Rydric's face for a long moment, and then he smiled—a small, weary smile that contained neither triumph nor mockery.
"Then let us not waste lives," he said, in Vestimarian. His accent was heavy, the vowels rounded in the Jaludi fashion, but his meaning was unmistakable. "I learned your tongue during the war with your father's father, King Rydric. I spoke it poorly then. I speak it only a little less poorly now. But I think for what we must say, poor words may serve better than pretty ones."
Rydric stared at him. Then, unexpectedly, the king laughed—not the bitter, savage laugh with which he had dashed the wine amphora against the earth three days earlier, but a genuine laugh of surprise and something approaching admiration.
"You speak Vestimarian," he said. "Of course you do. Of course the Sultan of half the world speaks Vestimarian and never saw fit to mention it in any of his letters."
"I find it useful," Seylim said, "to be underestimated. But I think, between us, the time for that has passed. Come. I have asked my servants to prepare food. A man speaks truer with bread in his belly, and I find that peace is hungry work."
The tent was a marvel of Jaludi craftsmanship—woven goat-hair dyed in geometric patterns of crimson and indigo, its interior hung with silk panels that turned the harsh Kedrayan sunlight into something soft and aqueous. Carpets had been laid over the stony ground, and low tables of inlaid cedar bore platters of the same provisions that had been sent to mock the Esberian army, though here they were arranged without the cruel theatricality of the earlier procession. There were no donkeys, no smiling emissaries, no audience of starving soldiers. There was only food, and cushions, and the quiet efficiency of servants who poured cool water into silver cups and withdrew without speaking.
The two rulers sat across from one another. Rydric had brought only Baudren and Nasir into the tent; Seylim had brought two men—a grizzled old emir named Hishan, whose left arm ended at the wrist in a puckered scar, and a young scribe with ink-stained fingers who said nothing and wrote everything. The rest of their retinues waited outside, where Esberian knights and Jaludi mamluks eyed one another with the wary cordiality of wolves sharing a watering hole.
"Tell me about your hawks," Seylim said, breaking a piece of flatbread and dipping it into a dish of olive oil flecked with za'atar. "I have heard that the kings of Esberia keep gyrfalcons."
Rydric blinked. He had been preparing himself for a discussion of terms, of boundaries, of the disposition of fortresses and the exchange of prisoners. He had not prepared for hawks.
"They are the finest birds in the world," he said, after a pause. "White as snow. Faster than any hawk in the northern kingdoms. My grandfather used to say that a gyrfalcon does not hunt—it simply decides what it wishes to kill, and the thing obliges by dying."
"A good bird," Seylim said, nodding appreciatively. "Here we fly sakers. Not so white, not so fast, but clever. A saker will watch a man for an hour to learn his habits before it returns to the glove." He smiled, and this time the smile reached his eyes. "Perhaps this is a difference between our peoples, King Rydric. You value speed and power. We value patience."
"Patience," Rydric said dryly, "is a luxury of those who are not two thousand miles from home with winter coming."
"Ah, but you see, that is precisely my point. A saker does not fly two thousand miles. It stays where it belongs, and it waits." Seylim signalled for wine to be poured for the Esberians—a concession to his guest, for the Unitarians were forbidden it, but the Sultan had evidently decided that hospitality outweighed piety. "Your hawks are magnificent, but they are far from their nests. My sakers are perched on their own walls. There is no dishonour in acknowledging this. It is simply the shape of the ground."
"There is dishonour in defeat," Baudren growled from his place behind Rydric. The old lord had been doing his best to appear stoic, but the cushions did not agree with his knees, and the wine was too sweet for his taste, and he distrusted every word that came out of the Sultan's mouth on principle.
Seylim regarded him with a kind of gentle amusement. "Lord Baudren, is it? I have heard of you. You fought at the bridge of Qasr al-Hawir, yes?"
"I did."
"You killed seventeen men that day. My chroniclers wrote of it. They described you as a bear in human shape." Seylim took a sip of water—his own cup contained no wine—and added, "I lost a cousin at that bridge. A young man, very hot-headed. He saw the bear and decided to prove himself a hunter. The bear, I am told, did not find his argument persuasive."
A profound silence settled over the Esberian side of the tent. Baudren's face, already red, deepened to the colour of raw liver. But the Sultan's tone had held no accusation, only the weary acknowledgment of a man who had buried too many cousins and had learned to separate the fact of death from the anger of it.
"War," Seylim continued, "is a series of arguments that no one wins. Your Elyon the Anointed taught that one should turn the other cheek to a blow. My Rasul al-Haqq, peace be upon his name, taught that the greatest jihad is the struggle against one's own anger. And yet here we sit, two old men who have spent our lives proving that we are very bad students of our own prophets." He gestured around the tent. "I find this absurd. Do you not find this absurd, King Rydric?"
Rydric was silent for a long moment. Outside, the breeze stirred the silk panels, and the shadows of olive branches moved across the carpet like fingers tracing a text no one could read.
"I have been fighting," he said at last, "since I was sixteen years old. I have killed more men than I can count. I have taken cities and lost them and taken them again. I have been wounded in places I did not know could hurt. And in all that time, no one—not one person, Seylim ibn Tahir—has ever asked me if I find it absurd. Not my bishops. Not my lords. Not my confessors. They tell me it is glorious, or necessary, or ordained by Heaven. They never ask if it makes sense."
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"And does it?"
"It makes sense when you are in it. It makes sense when the blood is hot and the trumpets are sounding and your enemy is right there, close enough to strike. It is afterward, when the field is quiet and the crows are feeding, that it becomes..." He trailed off, searching for a word.
"Absurd," Seylim supplied.
"Yes," Rydric said. "That."
Seylim turned his cup slowly between his hands. “There is a village north of the old pilgrim road,” he said. “Or there was. Kafr Sahl. Do you know it?”
Rydric’s expression did not change, but something behind his eyes shuttered.
“I know many villages north of the pilgrim road.”
“This one had a well with a broken stone lip and a fig tree in the square. My men found it after your vanguard passed through. Thirty-seven dead. Mostly old men. Some children. The women had fled into the olive groves.”
Baudren shifted behind Rydric. Nasir went very still.
Rydric set his wine down carefully. “Your riders burned Saint Merrow’s chapel at Bel Ruman with forty pilgrims inside.”
Seylim’s face hardened.
“So your priests say.”
“So the bones said.”
The tent seemed suddenly smaller. The cushions, the food, the silk panels, the careful hospitality—all of it thinned to a painted screen with the old war waiting behind it.
Seylim looked at him across the table. “Then we have both brought ghosts to dine with us.”
“Aye,” Rydric said. “I did not come alone.”
“No. Nor did I.”
For a moment neither man spoke. Outside, a horse stamped, and somewhere beyond the tent one of the guards coughed into his fist.
Then Seylim said, quieter than before, “Your songs remember your dead.”
“So do yours.”
“That is the trouble with songs,” Seylim said. “They never leave room for the corpses on the other side.”
Rydric held his gaze. “Then perhaps we should speak today without songs.”
“Perhaps we should.” The Sultan leaned back on his cushions and studied the Esberian king with an expression that was difficult to read—curiosity, perhaps, or recognition, or something older and more private. The young scribe's pen scratched steadily. Lord Hishan, the one-handed emir, had not moved a muscle since the parley began, but his eyes were very bright and very attentive.
"You are not what I expected," Seylim said.
"Nor you," Rydric replied. "I was told you ate the hearts of your enemies."
"Only on feast days. And only with a very good sauce." The Sultan's face remained perfectly grave for the space of three heartbeats, and then the corner of his mouth twitched, and Rydric snorted into his wine, and the tension that had hung over the tent like a shroud dissolved into something almost comfortable.
They ate. They talked of philosophy—or rather, they circled around philosophy. Seylim quoted the poetry of Al-Munir ibn Faraz, the great bard of the Ibrani courts, and Nasir struggled to render the couplets into Vestimarian verse, producing translations so garbled that the Sultan was forced to explain the metaphors himself in his halting, carefully enunciated Vestimarian. Rydric, in turn, recited a fragment of the Lay of Saint Eloria, the founding epic of the Esberian people, and the Sultan listened with his eyes half-closed, nodding at the cadences even when the words escaped him.
"Your saint fought a dragon," Seylim observed when Rydric had finished. "My prophet wrestled with an angel who filled the sky from horizon to horizon. It seems our peoples have a shared fondness for impossible opponents."
"The dragon in the Lay is a metaphor," said Nasir, unable to resist the scholarly observation. "The Esberian exegetes hold that it represents the darkness of the unillumined soul."
"Yes," Rydric said, "and my grandmother held that it was a dragon. She was a literal-minded woman. She once struck a bishop for suggesting that the Prophet Elyon's miracles were allegorical."
"What happened to the bishop?"
"He agreed with her. Enthusiastically. The miracles became extremely literal. The bruise took two weeks to fade." Rydric tore a piece of bread and chewed it meditatively. "I miss her. She would have liked you. She had no patience for people who spoke around things. Nothing like my mother."
"You have her gift for directness," Seylim said. "I noticed it in your letters. Even through the courtly language, there was a certain..." He paused, selecting the word with care. "Impatience."
"Impatience is the defining Esberian trait. It is why we conquered half the world and lost most of it again within a century. We are a people who cannot sit still."
"And yet you have sat still outside my walls for seven weeks."
"Which is why I am here," Rydric said, and the lightness in his voice ebbed, replaced by the gravity that had been waiting beneath the banter all along. "I did not come to discuss hawks and poetry, though I have enjoyed both more than I expected. I came to end this."
He set down his cup.
"Lift the siege," he said. "Let Illuminant pilgrims visit Solymer freely. Let them walk the Path of Radiance and pray at the Sanctuary of the Revealed Light without toll, without harassment, without fear. In return, the Esberian host will withdraw. We will return to our ships and sail home, and we will not trouble your lands again during my reign. This I swear, upon the star of Elyon and upon my crown."
The silence that followed was very long.
Seylim did not look at his emir. He did not look at his scribe. He looked only at Rydric, and his dark eyes held a depth of consideration that went far beyond the simple weighing of terms.
"You offer peace," the Sultan said slowly, "and I am glad of it. Truly. Too many have died. Too many will die still, regardless of what we decide here, because wars have a weight that carries them forward long after the men who started them have dropped the reins. But I must speak plainly, King Rydric, as you have spoken plainly to me." He leaned forward, and the lamplight caught the lines on his face, making him look every one of his fifty years. "A treaty of words is only as strong as the men who remember it. You and I may swear eternal friendship here, and I believe you would keep your oath. But you will not live forever. Your son—or your daughter's husband, or the nephew who seizes your throne after a bitter winter—may not remember this day as I will. And the holy men on both sides, whose trade is in absolutes, will whisper that the peace was a coward's bargain."
He spread his hands, a gesture of regret and invitation.
"A treaty of seals and signatures can be broken by a single ambitious lord. A treaty of blood—of shared blood, of mingled houses—that is harder to dissolve. It gives the peace roots. It gives it a face, and a name, and a reason to endure beyond the lives of two old men who have grown tired of killing."
Rydric understood. He understood immediately, and the understanding struck him like a blow to the chest. He did not speak for a long time. The spring burbled. The olive branches scratched against the silk.
"You are speaking of a marriage," he said at last.
"I am speaking of a marriage," Seylim confirmed. "Your house and mine. A bond that no holy man and no ambitious lord can simply declare void."
“Not tomorrow,” Seylim added. “Not in haste, not with half the law unwritten and the priests still sharpening their little knives. First a solemn betrothal, witnessed by both hosts. A pledge binding enough that neither army can walk away pretending it was only talk, but not so final that the clerics can claim we trampled every law in our hurry.”
Rydric’s jaw worked.
“And the wedding?”
“When the treaty has been sealed in full. When the roads are safe. When both courts have had time to exhaust themselves with objections and discover that peace has survived them.”
“That could take months.”
“Yes.”
“Years, if the priests have their way.”
Seylim’s mouth curved faintly. “Then for once, let us pray for stubborn priests.”
Rydric almost laughed.
Then the humour died between them.
The king of Esberia looked down at his hands—the hands that had signed death warrants and writs of mercy with equal facility. When he looked up, there was something new in his grey eyes: the particular pain of a man who has been offered exactly what he asked for, and has only just realised the cost of the asking.
"I have a daughter," he said. His voice was hoarse. "Alianor. Her mother died when she was six. She is..." He paused, and the pause was eloquent with complicated love. "She is fiercer than I am. More devout. More certain that Elyon's will is a straight path and not a winding road. She will not understand this."
"I have a son," Seylim replied. "Zeid. He is also fierce. Also devout. Also, I think, more certain of things than I have ever been." The Sultan's expression flickered with something that might have been amusement or might have been grief—it was impossible to tell, and Rydric, who was learning to read this strange adversary, suspected that the ambiguity was intentional. "He was not born to be a courtier. But he was born to be a ruler, and rulers must learn that their bodies are not their own. They belong to their people. This is a lesson that princes learn, or they do not remain princes."
"Will he be kind to her?" Rydric asked. The question was raw, uncalculated, entirely unkingly. "You say he is fierce. Will he be kind?"
Seylim met his gaze without flinching. "He has capacities for kindness that he does not show the world. I cannot tell you more than that. I will not lie to you and promise a gentle husband, for I do not know what kind of husband he will be. But I will swear to you, upon the Book of the One Covenant and upon my hope of righteousness, that your daughter shall be honoured in my house as though she were born of my own body. This I can promise." He had not lied to Rydric. Not exactly. That was the cowardice of it.
Another silence. Nasir held his breath. Baudren, who had been prepared to hate the Sultan and had found the project increasingly difficult, stared at the carpet and said nothing.
"Then I offer my daughter Alianor to your son Zeid," Rydric said, and the words came out of him like stones dragged up from a deep well. "Let the marriage bind our houses. Let it be the root of the peace."
Seylim rose to his feet. For a moment he stood looking down at the seated king, and then he extended his hand—not the formal gesture of a ruler sealing a treaty, but a soldier's grip, palm to palm, the clasp of equals who have found one another across a chasm of blood and history.
"I accept," the Sultan said. "And I honour your courage, Rydric of Esberia. It is easier to storm a wall than to give away a child."
The two men clasped hands, and held the grip longer than protocol required, and somewhere outside the tent a mamluk who had been poised to die for his sultan let out a breath he had not known he was holding, and an Esberian knight who had been certain he would never see his northern homeland again felt something that might have been hope crack through the hard shell of his heart like a seedling in stony ground.
By evening, the pavilion had been struck, and the food had been cleared, and the servants were loading the last of the platters onto mules, and the two rulers walked together along the edge of the spring. They were deep in conversation, their voices too low for anyone to hear. The olive trees cast long shadows across the water. The light was amber, then rose, then the deep blue of the Kedrayan dusk. Soldiers from both camps stood at a distance and watched their masters pace back and forth, and none of them could remember ever having seen anything quite like it—the Lion of Esberia and the Sword of the Covenant, side by side, arguing amiably about something that made them both gesture with their hands, as though they were not the principals of a holy war but a pair of old scholars disputing a point of grammar.
"I do not understand," said a young Esberian squire to Lord Baudren, who was rubbing his aching knees and drinking the last of the wine straight from the amphora. "Are we still enemies?"
Baudren lowered the amphora and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He watched the two distant figures—the straw-haired king and the grey-bearded sultan—and shook his head slowly, the way a man shakes his head at the inexplicable workings of the divine.
"Lad," he said, "I have been fighting the Jaludians since before your mother weaned you. I have seen a good many things in that time. But I have never seen a man conquer a city with a piece of flatbread and a well-timed joke." He took another drink. "We are whatever they decide we are. That is the first lesson of soldiering. The second is never complain when the killing stops."
He watched the two leaders vanish into the deepening twilight, still talking, still walking, their silhouettes merging with the shapes of the ancient olive trees, and he thought, but did not say aloud, that it was a strange and terrifying thing to discover that one's enemy was a man one might have liked, in a different world, in a different time, over a different meal.