The training yard of the Esberian camp was a trampled patch of dust and dead grass, but it was the only place Princess Alianor felt entirely herself. She had requisitioned it an hour before dawn, as she did every morning that the siege allowed, and she was already slicked with sweat by the time the sun cleared the eastern hills. Her sword was a handspan longer than the standard Esberian arming blade, forged in the smithies of Tarsen to her exact specifications—lighter than it looked, balanced for a fighter who relied on speed rather than brute strength, its crossguard worked into the shape of two unfurling wings. She had named it Mercy, which her father found hilarious and her confessor found blasphemous, and she had never once cared what either of them thought about it.
Her opponent this morning was a young knight named Sir Aubrey of Valrens, who had made the mistake of offering to spar with her three weeks earlier and had been returning, bruised and baffled and strangely eager, ever since. He was a big man, broad across the chest, his beard a thicket of copper wire, and he had not yet learned that size meant nothing against someone who had been killing since she was fourteen.
"Again," Alianor said.
Aubrey lunged. She sidestepped, hooked his ankle with the flat of her blade, and sent him crashing onto his back in the dust for the fourth time that morning. The impact drove the breath from his lungs in a great whoofing gasp.
"You are thinking about it," Alianor said, standing over him with the tip of Mercy resting lightly against his breastbone. "That is your problem. A blade does not think. A blade moves. You are too much in your head."
"I am too much on my arse," Aubrey wheezed.
"That also." She withdrew the sword and extended her free hand. He took it, and she hauled him up with a strength that always surprised men who had not yet learned to stop being surprised. "Your guard drops when you lunge. You are afraid of overextending, so you hold something back. Holding something back will get you killed."
"I am afraid of accidentally striking a princess of the blood," Aubrey admitted, dusting himself off. "It seems impolitic."
"If you can strike me, you will have earned the right. So far you have not come close." She sheathed Mercy in one fluid motion and began unwinding the leather wrappings from her forearms. "We are finished. Thank you for the exercise."
Aubrey bowed, a little stiffly, and limped off toward the knights' tents. Alianor watched him go with the same expression she wore when evaluating a horse—assessing, unsentimental, faintly disappointed. He was not a bad swordsman. None of them were bad swordsmen. But they were all slower than her, and softer in their resolve, and they all wanted something from her that they were too politic to name.
Her maid Sivelle was waiting at the edge of the yard with a skin of watered wine and a cloth. Sivelle of Tarsen was a small woman, dark-haired and sharp-chinned, who had been attached to Alianor's household since the princess was twelve and had long since ceased to be scandalised by anything her mistress did. She had learned to armour a woman faster than most squires, and she kept Mercy's edge honed to a razor finish, and she never, ever offered opinions unless asked. This was why Alianor trusted her.
"You have broken Sir Aubrey again," Sivelle observed, handing over the wine.
"He breaks easily."
"Most things do, beside you. Your father is asking for you."
Alianor drank deeply before answering. "My father is always asking for me."
"He said to tell you it was not a war matter. He said to tell you it was a family matter." Sivelle paused, and in that pause Alianor heard the careful architecture of withheld concern. "He looked strange when he said it."
The king's pavilion had been rearranged since the parley. The great table with its maps and tally-sticks had been pushed to one side, and in its place stood two chairs, facing one another, as though the tent had been transformed from a council chamber into a confessional. Rydric was seated in one of them when Alianor entered. He had removed his surcoat and wore only a plain linen tunic, and his hair was damp from washing. He looked, she thought, like a man who had already fought a battle today and was preparing himself for another.
"Sit," he said.
She did not sit. "I am filthy. I have been in the yard."
"I know. I heard Sir Aubrey groaning from clear across the camp." He attempted a smile. It did not take. "Sit, Alianor. Please."
She sat. The word please was not a word her father used often, and it unsettled her more than a shouted command would have done. She laid Mercy across her knees, an instinctive gesture, as though the sword were a chaperone that might protect her from whatever was coming.
"I have spoken with the Sultan," Rydric began.
"I know. The whole camp knows. You spoke with the Sultan, you ate with the Sultan, you quoted poetry with the Sultan, you walked with the Sultan until the stars came out. The soldiers are calling it the Miracle of the Spring. Some of them think you have converted."
"And what do you think?"
"I think you are too stubborn to convert to anything except your own ruin." She said it without malice, the way one soldier speaks to another, and her father's smile flickered briefly into genuine life before dying again.
"The siege is over," he said. "Or it will be, once the terms are settled. We withdraw. They let our pilgrims walk the Path of Radiance unmolested. No tolls, no harassment. The Sanctuary of the Revealed Light will be open to every Illuminant who wishes to pray there. No more blood. No more dying." He drew a breath that seemed to cost him something. "I have achieved what I came here to achieve. Not through war, but through talk. Through—absurd as it sounds—through friendship."
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Alianor's eyes, which were the same grey as his own, narrowed almost imperceptibly. "Those are the terms we offer. What are the terms they demanded?"
Rydric looked at her for a long moment. Outside the pavilion, a mule brayed, and someone cursed in the broad vowels of the northern provinces, and the ordinary life of the camp went on, indifferent to the silence that was building between father and daughter like a wall.
"The Sultan requires a guarantee," Rydric said. "A bond that will outlast the two of us. The holy men on both sides will hate this peace. They will call it a betrayal, a compromise with darkness. The only thing they cannot call it is a treaty between strangers. So the peace must be a marriage."
He stopped. The word hung in the air between them.
Alianor's face did not change. It became, if anything, more still—the stillness of a woman who had learned in childhood to armour her feelings as thoroughly as her body.
"A marriage," she repeated.
"Yes."
"Between whose houses?"
"Ours and the House of Tahir al-Din."
"Yes," Alianor said, her voice perfectly flat. "I thought that was what you were going to say. You want me to marry an infidel."
"The Sultan's son. Prince Zeid. He is—"
"I know who he is. I have heard the reports." She rose from the chair, and Mercy came up with her, still sheathed, held across her body like a barricade. "He rides well. He fights adequately. He is said to be beautiful in the way that a fine horse is beautiful. He follows the false prophet and denies the divinity of Elyon's light, and you wish me to marry him."
Rydric stood also. He was taller than her, but not by much, and the two of them faced each other with the charged intensity of two swords held point to point.
"I wish you to save the lives of every man in this camp," he said quietly. "I wish you to secure the freedom of pilgrimage for every Illuminant who will ever walk the roads to Solymer. I wish you to be the cornerstone of a peace that will prevent a hundred more wars and a hundred thousand more graves. Yes, Alianor. I wish you to marry him."
"I am a knight," she said. "I have bled for this army. I have killed for it. I have held dying men while they screamed for their mothers. I did not do those things so that I could be traded like a broodmare to seal a bargain you struck over lunch."
The cruelty of the final word landed like a slap. Rydric flinched, and Alianor saw it, and something flickered behind her eyes—regret, perhaps, or grief, or the anger that so often wears the mask of both—but she did not take it back.
"I am not trading you," Rydric said, and his voice had gone rough, the polished composure of the king stripped away to reveal the raw grain of the man beneath. "I am asking you. I am asking, because your consent is the only thing that makes this anything other than a transaction. If you refuse, I will not force you. I will go back to Seylim and I will tell him the marriage is impossible, and we will find another way, or we will not, and the siege will resume, and men will go on dying, and one of those men may be me, and one of them may be Aubrey, and one of them may be Baudren, who taught you to grip a sword, and one of them may be Sivelle if the camp fever spreads and the food runs out entirely. But I will not force you. I will never force you. You are my daughter. You are my pride. You are the only soul in this army who has never disappointed me, and I will not begin the disappointing by making you a prisoner."
Alianor said nothing. The silence stretched.
"Will he be kind to you?" Rydric asked, and the echo of the question he had asked Seylim at the spring was unmistakable. "I do not know. I could not know. But his father is a man of honour, and I am gambling—gambling with more than I have ever gambled on any battlefield—that honour runs in the blood."
"You are asking me to lie beside a man who believes Elyon is a prophet and not the light," Alianor said. Her voice was very low now, almost a whisper. "You are asking me to bear his children. You are asking me to kneel in a house of the false covenant and smile while the muwahhidun call their prayers and my soul withers inside me. Do you understand what you are asking?"
"Yes," Rydric said. "I understand. And I am sorry."
"Your sorrow does not unmake the asking."
"No. It does not."
Alianor turned away from him. She walked to the entrance of the pavilion and stood there, silhouetted against the white glare of the Kedrayan morning, one hand resting on the hilt of Mercy. The sword's winged crossguard caught the light and threw it back in fragments.
"I need time," she said, without turning around.
"Take it."
"Do not speak to me again today."
"Very well."
She left. The tent flap fell closed behind her, and King Rydric Aldren, Lion of Esberia, conqueror of cities, breaker of armies, stood alone in the sudden dimness and felt the full weight of what he had done settle onto his shoulders like a cloak of lead.
The tent flap stirred again.
Rydric did not turn. “I said I was not to be disturbed.”
“Aye,” Baudren said. “You say many things.”
The old lord stepped inside without waiting for permission. He smelled of dust, sweat, leather, and wine. There were men in the camp who would have trembled to enter the king’s pavilion unbidden. Baudren had known Rydric when he was a red-faced boy swinging a sword too heavy for his wrists, and had long ago decided that fear was wasted on children one had seen vomit from bad ale.
“She hates me,” Rydric said.
“She loves you. That is worse.”
Rydric closed his eyes.
Baudren came to stand beside the abandoned chair. Mercy’s absence from Alianor’s lap seemed to have left a shape in the air.
“You told her you would not force her,” he said.
“I meant it.”
“Aye. That is the trouble. You meant it, and still the whole army is standing behind the question with a knife.”
Rydric turned then, and for an instant he looked less like a king than a man struck in the ribs.
“You think I do not know that?”
“I think you know it well enough to suffer and not well enough to stop.”
The words landed brutally. Baudren let them. He had never believed love was served by gentleness when truth was needed.
“If she refuses,” Rydric said, “I will not make her.”
“No. But she will see the graves before they are dug. She will hear every man who starves because she would not bend. She will put their deaths on her own soul before any priest can do it for her.” Baudren’s face softened, though only barely. “You gave her a choice no one could survive cleanly.”
Rydric looked toward the tent entrance, toward the white glare into which his daughter had vanished.
“I have won cities with less cruelty than this.”
“Aye,” Baudren said. “That is why it tastes so foul.”
For a while neither man spoke.
Then Baudren sighed, the sound of an old door giving way. “For what it is worth, I think she will stand before them.”
Rydric’s mouth tightened. “Consent?”
Baudren did not answer.
The silence was answer enough.