The siege of Darat al-Bahr had entered its eighth month by then, and the holy expedition had begun to consume its own splendour. The city was starving, but so were the besiegers. Supply ships from the west arrived late, their captains blaming storms, pirates, and the Rhomanian harbour-masters’ fees. The Esberian camp had exhausted its credit with the Lagoran counting rooms. Some Valcierran sergeants hid desertions by keeping vanished men on the ration rolls. Disease moved through the tents. Morain brought the numbers to council each morning and made enemies by reading them aloud.
“Three days’ barley if the horse rations are halved,” he said. “Five if the knights agree that noble mounts eat as little as the others.”
Sir Odo crossed his arms. “Tell that to the knights.”
“I have. They accused me of insulting their lineage.”
“You did.”
“Wrong. I insulted their horses.”
Lord Tanrek, whose mind remained forever half at sea, tapped the coast map with two fingers. “The harbour must fall before the next moon or the fleet begins to rot in places. Ships are not saints. They do not endure suffering for spiritual reward.”
Father Aldemar, gaunt from too many sickbeds, murmured that endurance itself might become witness if offered to the Revealed Light.
Tanrek looked at him. “Father, with reverence, I cannot caulk a hull with witness.”
Rydric laughed, but the laughter had grown thin. Even then, in the council tent with the banner of the Revealed Star hanging above the maps, he felt the songs beginning to strain under the weight of carts, corpses, mouldy grain, wounded horses, unpaid sailors, and prisoners who needed guarding while the army itself needed rescue.
Aelis had arrived in the east as a bride-in-waiting, a political ornament whose marriage would seal the alliance after victory, but victory refused to arrive, and Aelis had refused to remain ornamental. She learned the Kedrayan trade-tongue that ran through the coast markets, a practical braid of Jaludi, Vestimarian, Rhomanian, Lagoran and Ibrani counting words. She listened to enemy envoys with more patience than the barons and more suspicion than the priests. She arranged relic processions when morale sank: the finger-bone of Saint Eloria, the veil of Saint Merrow, the iron nail said to have pierced Elyon’s hand, all carried through the camp while priests chanted and the dying reached with fingers already cold. She sat in the fever-tents, not as a nurse—she had no skill for it and even less patience—but as a royal witness. She promised dying knights that their names would not be lost. To some of them, that promise mattered more than any assurance of the Returning.
Brother Osbert copied those names when parchment could be spared. When it could not, he wrote them on scraps cut from old supply orders, prayer margins, and the backs of wine tallies. Aelis corrected his spellings. Morain complained that the dead now had better records than the living.
She did all this while her marriage to Rydric remained unsolemnized, unconsummated, and postponed for the fifth time.
The camp knew. Some said Rydric would never marry her because she was cursed. Others whispered that Alianor had ensorcelled her father with grief. Others said the Valcierran woman was too clever and that no king wanted a wife who could count his mistakes faster than his victories. Aelis bore the whispers with composure. Felrian, who knew her best, recognized the mask she wore when she was nearest to doing something dangerous. But Rydric did not. He saw everything on a battlefield. In chambers, he mistook silence for patience. And Nasir al-Jamil saw more than anyone knew. He had been taken at Qasr al-Hawir, too learned to be thrown among common prisoners, too useful to be ransomed quickly, too dangerous to be trusted and not dangerous enough, so the westerners thought, to be feared properly. Rydric called him interpreter, though he knew he could be a spy, but had perfect confidence in his harmlessness. He wrote reports to Seylim when he could. He listened when he could not. Aelis, he decided, was the most dangerous person in the camp.
Rydric could be provoked. Felrian could be delayed. Alianor could be wounded. Aelis could bind all three with time.
A supply caravan had been cut apart on the coastward road. The survivors blamed the Marduni hill-men, but the ambush had been too clean, the scouts too neatly drawn off, the stolen grain too quickly vanished toward the city. Darat al-Bahr, which everyone had believed too starved for boldness, had struck like a knife from a sleeve.
Rydric convened the war council in the great pavilion. Maps covered the long table. Iron braziers stood cold in the corners because the air was already heavy enough. The banner of the Revealed Light hung limp above them. Aelis sat beside Felrian. Alianor stood near the tent-flap with dust on her boots. Sir Aubrey leaned on a spear near the guard line, one arm bandaged from the morning patrol. Baudren stood near the map-table. Sir Odo watched the tent entrance. Nasir stood near Brother Osbert, a guard behind him. The council argued first about the supply raid, then about the prisoners.
The Esberian camp held Jaludi captives taken in assaults on Darat al-Bahr’s outer works. They were bargaining counters, ransom hope, and a daily drain on food. Some were soldiers. Most were porters, boys, grooms, cooks, masons, men seized nearby. The Valcierran quartermasters wanted the prisoners moved to the rear camps. Esberian knights wanted executions in reprisal for the supply raid. Father Aldemar and several priests urged mercy: instructions in the Revealed Light where possible, release of the unarmed where safe, and a public sign that Illuminant victory did not require slaughter.
Morain listened until he could bear no more.
“Mercy requires bread,” he said. “Reprisal requires willingness. Transfer requires guards. Every proposal in this tent spends something we do not have.”
“Execute one in ten, then,” Aelis said. “Send the bodies to the gates with a message: for every supply caravan struck under truce or darkness, another tenth dies. Move the rest to the rear camps under guard. It will be fewer deaths than reprisal and fewer mouths to feed than mercy.”
The pavilion went still. Nasir lowered his eyes, but not quickly enough. Aelis saw that he had understood before some of the western barons had.
“You object?” she asked him.
The guard behind Nasir shifted.
Nasir bowed. “Sayidati, I am a captive. My objections are not provisioned.”
Alianor spoke from the tent-flap. “And who chooses the tenth?”
“Lots,” Aelis said.
“Soldiers draw swords, not lots.”
“Then draw yours and choose by hand, if chance offends you.”
Baudren’s hand moved toward his belt.
Alianor’s voice lowered. “You have never stood before a man who knew he was about to die and looked him in the face. You sit here and call killing measured because measure is a prettier word than blood.”
Aelis’s expression did not change. “You are right that I have never killed a man. I have watched men die. I have held letters for men whose hands shook too hard to write. I have learned the names of widows I will never meet. I have buried children who died of fever because their mothers followed the army and had nowhere else to go.” Her eyes moved briefly to Rydric, then back. “I have done all this while the man I was promised to kept finding reasons not to marry me. Counting is all that remains.”
Alianor’s hand moved to the misericorde.
“You will finally draw it,” Aelis said. “Sir Galeran’s parting gift.”
“Do not speak his name.”
“The camp speaks it for you. You will keep carrying that knife and that grief until everyone who loves your father is dead, gone, or too tired to stand beside him. Making him live inside your mourning, is that what Esberians call filial piety?”
Alianor drew the misericorde. The movement was quick enough that Baudren’s sword came halfway from its scabbard before he checked himself. The blade in Alianor’s hand was narrow, elegant, made for the mercy of a killing thrust. She held it one step away from Aelis’s throat.
“I will ask once,” Alianor said. “Leave this tent.”
Aelis rose. “I am Princess Aelis of Valcierre and betrothed to the king of Esberia. I do not leave councils at the command of a knight who does not know her place.”
Rydric stood. “Enough.”
The word cracked through the pavilion. Alianor did not look away from Aelis.
“Father,” she said.
“Sheathe the blade.”
For a moment her face changed. Rydric saw, not a knight, but the child who had hidden in the stables after her mother’s death, refusing food until Sivelle had been sent to sit in the straw beside her. Then the child vanished.
“She will never be my mother,” Alianor said. “She will never be my queen. I will not serve her, even if you command it. I will not love her. I will not pretend. If you marry her, you marry her over my body or hers. That is not a threat, it is a prophecy.”
She sheathed the misericorde and walked out. Sivelle, waiting outside among the attendants, followed without asking leave.
No one spoke until both women were gone. Aelis’s hands were steady when she smoothed her gown.
“You have a choice,” she said to Rydric. “You have always had it. One of us will break first. When that happens do not call it misfortune.”
She left by the other entrance.
The council dissolved in pieces. Father Aldemar gathered his star-beads. Morain took the ration board. Sir Odo dismissed the guards. Nasir remained because no one had remembered to dismiss him.
That, he had learned, was how captives survived courts: by becoming furniture until the room forgot that furniture had ears.
Felrian had not spoken during the confrontation. He had watched his sister and Alianor with attention.
“She is right,” he said.
Rydric looked at him.
“You cannot keep all of us forever. Aelis is tired. Your daughter is past tired. The army is rotting, and the siege has begun to make decisions for us. Choose before the choice is taken from you.”
“Help me hold it together.”
“I have been helping you hold it together for years.”
“One more victory,” Rydric said. “After Darat al-Bahr, I will make it right. I swear.”
Felrian’s face changed very little. That was how Rydric knew he had wounded him.
“You said that last winter.”
“I mean it now.”
Felrian looked toward the tent-flap through which Aelis had gone.
“Then do not swear it before.”
Three days later, he gave Rydric the occasion. The demand came before the prisoner exchange, in the same council tent, with Shaykh Burhan al-Khalil waiting outside under truce, his henna-red beard visible through the open flap and his patience arranged like a diplomatic weapon. The proposed exchange would move fifty captives from each side under witnesses: Ibrani elders, Brother Osbert for the Esberian record, a Rhomanian observer, Nasir for translation, and sworn men from both armies. Aelis asked to attend as formal witness for Valcierre and as Rydric’s pledged bride. Rydric could refuse and humiliate her before envoys, barons, and clerks. Or he could agree and give public shape to what he had postponed in private. A clean courtly demand that left no room to delay without showing it.
Felrian watched him from across the table. Baudren understood first. His eyes moved from Felrian to Aelis, then to Rydric.
“Your Grace,” he said quietly, “a witness near the prisoner line may be exposed if the truce breaks.”
“Then give her a guard,” Felrian said.
“Whose?”
Felrian’s eyes moved toward the tent entrance, where Alianor stood. Rydric felt the trap close with the softness of silk. Aelis looked at him.
Rydric said, “Princess Aelis will attend as witness. Princess Alianor will ride with the escort.”
The exchange was set for a meadow outside Darat al-Bahr’s northern gate, where dry grass, wild thyme, and a line of cypresses marked the edge of the broken ground. The terms were precise. Fifty prisoners from each side. Simultaneous movement. No drawn blades beyond guard distance. Names read in Vestimarian and Jaludi. Witnessed by Ibrani elders, Brother Osbert, the Rhomanian observer, Nasir, and sworn men from both armies. Shaykh Burhan approved the order with grave courtesy. Aelis travelled in a curtained litter because protocol demanded it and because Valcierre would not have its princess jostled before Jaludi envoys. She disliked the litter. Alianor rode beside it with her visor raised. Sir Aubrey rode ahead of them with the bandage still on his arm. Sir Odo took the rear guard. Baudren commanded the escort.
Nasir walked under guard near Brother Osbert and the Rhomanian observer. Before they left camp, he had gone behind the prisoner scribes’ tent, where broken reed cases and spoiled parchment were thrown for burning. There, while a mule brayed and two squires argued over whether a dead man’s boots belonged to his lord or his brothers, Nasir took a waxed silk packet from his sleeve hem. Inside, lay black hashish resin, smaller than a lentil, bitter as old smoke. He placed it under his tongue and waited until the noise of the camp moved one pace farther away from his skin.
The Hidden Mountain had taught him never to seek visions. Visions made men vain. The resin was not for dreams. It was for the narrowing of the world, for the slowing of the hand, for the small cold chamber inside fear where a blade might wait. He had no blade worth the name. That did not matter. A knife was only the most honest form of edge. A reed knife, a bodkin, a sliver of steel hidden in the spine of a writing case: all could open flesh if brought close enough. Nasir had carried his writing case since Qasr al-Hawir. Every guard had searched it once a week for months and found nothing suspicious.
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He placed the reed case into his sleeve and returned before anyone thought him missing. In the meadow, he saw Aelis lift the litter curtain once and look toward Alianor. He saw Alianor refuse to turn her head. He saw Felrian watching both women from beside the Valcierran banner.
The first group crossed. Men who had expected to die found themselves walking toward their own banner with faces emptied by relief.
The second group moved.
Then the meadow broke.
Later, no account agreed. Some said a Jaludi captive ran. Some said an Esberian man-at-arms struck a bound prisoner. Some said a Marduni guard misunderstood an order. One Ibrani elder swore he heard a horn from the city walls before the first blade came out. Brother Osbert wrote that the truce failed by confusion and fear. The Rhomanian observer only wrote that the order was lost.
Nasir remembered the sound before the sight: a horse screaming, a man calling on his mother in Jaludi, Brother Osbert dropping his reed case into the dust.
A horse reared. Someone shouted. Prisoners ran—some toward the Esberian line, some toward the city. Dust rose. A blade flashed. Alianor spurred forward before the first arrow flew.
“Aelis!”
The litter had turned sideways. One bearer had fallen. Another tried to run and dragged the frame with him. Aelis stumbled out, one hand tangled in the curtain, her face pale but composed. She shouted something Alianor could not hear.
Sir Aubrey rode across the front of the litter and took a spear-shaft across the ribs that nearly unhorsed him. Sir Odo bellowed for the rear guard to close. Baudren drove his horse through the edge of the panic, striking one running prisoner aside with the flat of his sword rather than cutting him down.
Nasir was shoved to the ground by his own guard. He let himself fall badly, shoulder first, sleeved under his body. A bound man collapsed across his legs, crying for water. The guard who had held Nasir’s lead-rope turned to strike another prisoner back from the witnesses’ lines.
Nasir rose without haste. No one looked at him. That was the gift panic gave to patient men.
Alianor forced her horse toward Aelis. A bound Jaludi man lurched across her path. She swerved rather than trample him. A Valcierran knight fell beside her, his horse screaming with an arrow in its neck. Smoke drifted from the far side of the meadow. Someone had fired dry grass near the gate, whether by accident or design, and the wind pushed the grey wave toward the cypresses.
Aelis reached the trees.
She was alone for three breaths.
Then Nasir was there.
She knew him at once. As the mild captive who had made her laugh once by translating a Jaludi insult too beautifully. As the scholar in the robe no one feared enough. As one of the useful men war made invisible.
His face was calm. In his right hand was a narrow sliver of steel no longer than two fingers, held low against his sleeve.
“You,” she said.
He bowed his head, almost apologetically.
“There is no one greater than the One,” he said in Jaludi.
She struck him.
It was a good blow. Her ring cut his cheek. He would carry the mark for weeks and explain it as a fall against a stone during the failed exchange. He stepped into her before she could draw breath ot scream.
The steel went under her ribs.
Her mouth opened. No sound came. His left hand caught her elbow as if helping her stand, and from a distance, through smoke and the smell of hashish, it might have looked like rescue.
Her eyes held his.
Then he pulled the silver free, turned it once in his palm, and let it drop into the churned mud beneath the cypress roots.
A rider plunged between the trees and the meadow. Marduni, perhaps. Or Esberian in dust-darkened mail. Later, no witness could swear. The horse’s shoulder struck Alianor’s knee. Her own mount stumbled. By the time she recovered, Aelis was falling backward into the shadow of the cypresses.
Alianor saw a hand reach toward her. She also saw the misericorde in her own hand.
She did not remember drawing it.
The foul smell of hashish was muddying her thoughts.
She could not believe she had done it.
For the rest of her life, that absence would remain.
Nasir was already on his knees beside Brother Osbert when the smoke thinned, one hand pressed to his own bleeding cheek, translating a Jaludi prisoner’s plea for his brother and looking as if he had never been anywhere else.
By dawn Aelis was found in the dry wadi beyond the cypresses, blood stiff in the folds of her gown, one shoe missing, the wound in her side deep enough that the physicians disagreed whether blade or arrow had made it. There was bruising on one arm, mud under her nails, and a smear of blood on her ring where she had struck someone no one knew to seek.
Nasir translated three witness accounts that contradicted one another and refused to translate a fourth because the man giving it had not been close enough to see anything.
The Rhomanian observer had seen Aelis fall near the cypresses but not the blow. Brother Osbert swore that Alianor rode toward the litter before smoke covered the field. Sir Aubrey, half-conscious from his broken ribs, remembered Alianor shouting Aelis’s name. A Valcierran knight claimed he saw the two women near the trees, but from too far away to hear. An Ibrani elder said a man in a pale robe moved through the smoke, though whether he was captive, clerk, priest, or ghost the elder could not say. Sir Odo insisted that the escort line had been broken by panic, not betrayal. Baudren said little and watched Alianor.
Alianor told the truth as she remembered it: the litter, the smoke, the cypresses, the blood, the shoe. She had tried to reach Aelis and failed. She did not mention the moment when the misericorde was in her hand.
Rydric believed her because she was his daughter, because she had ridden into the smoke, because the alternative would break something in him that had survived too long by refusing to break.
Felrian did not believe her. He stood beside Aelis’s body in the chapel tent. The priests had washed her face, folded her hands, and covered the wound with Valcierran blue. She looked younger than she had in life, emptied of wit and fury.
“Three years,” he said.
Rydric stood near the tent-flap, grey with exhaustion.
“Three years she defended you,” Felrian said. “To my barons. To my bishops. To every courtier who smiled over the delay. Three years she loved you while you fed her promises. Now she is dead, and your daughter lives, and you ask me to accept it.”
“It was battle.”
“It was consequences.”
Rydric took a step. “Say what you mean.”
Felrian did not turn.
“I mean that you knew the kind of rivalry that stood between them. They threatened to kill each other before. A witness said he saw her misericorde was drawn when she head to the cypresses.”
“Who said that?”
“The interpreter.”
“He said he could not be certain of what he saw. Alianor is a knight. She was ordered to protect Aelis. She swore to act with honor and duty. She would never murder an unarmed princess, even if she hates her. She knows the consequences.”
“The marriage that would have bound our houses will never happen,” Felrian said. “This is the consequence she wanted. Revoke her knight privileges and sentence her to death, and we will be even.”
“Grief speaks for you, Felrian. You do not mean what you just said.”
Nasir stood near the chapel entrance, summoned to translate for more witnesses who had not yet been brought in. His cheek stung where Aelis’s ring had cut him. He watched Felrian’s face and contained a smile.
The fever took Felrian four days after Aelis’s burial. It began as a dry throat and heaviness in the limbs, ordinary complaints in a camp where everyone slept badly and ate worse. By the second day, he could not stand. By the third, his skin burned beneath the physicians’ hands and his speech slipped between Vestimarian, Valcierran court phrases, and broken High Vestimarian he used when praying.
They carried him to the fever tents at the edge of camp, downwind of the latrines and upwind of the horse-lines, in the half-honoured quarter where the living waited to learn whether they belonged among the dead. The air inside was thick despite vinegar and rosemary: sweat, rot, blood dried into linen too valuable to throw away, and the sweet-sick smell of wounds beginning to turn. Men lay in rows. Some moaned. Some prayed. Some stared upward, already absent.
Rydric came on the second night. He had spent the day among envoys, captains, priests, and the pens where the remaining prisoners waited after the failed exchange. Shaykh Burhan had returned under truce with terms revised and narrowed. Morain had brought the ration board and said nothing until Rydric forced him. Tanrek warned that ships would not wait on royal grief. Father Aldemar begged for a final offer before blood answered blood. Sir Odo reported that men were already sharpening anger into plans.
Baudren said only, “If you do not decide, the camp will.”
That sentence followed Rydric into the fever tent. Felrian lay near the center, where the lamps gave the physicians enough light to see whether the king of Valcierre still breathed. His face was thinner than it had been a week before; the bones pressed close beneath the skin. Fever had stripped away the courtly mask anf left grief, rage, and moments of terrible clarity.
“This is divine punishment,” Felrian said.
“No.”
“For our behaviour. We hare in Holy Land. Elyon has punished me for loving you. He is asking me to repent.”
Felrian’s eyes fixed on the tent roof. “Why did you keep postponing it?”
Rydric said nothing.
“Was it Alianor? Was it Aelis? Was it me? Or did you love the shape of us more than any one of us? Three beneath one banner. Two kings and the woman who made alliance feel like desire instead of politics. Songs let men keep every promise at once. Marriage does not.”
“I loved her.”
“Then why did she die unmarried?”
Rydric looked down at his hands.
“I was afraid,” he said.
Felrian turned his head. His eyes were too bright.
“Of choosing?”
“Yes.”
“Then hear what your fear purchased. Aelis is dead. I am leaving. Esberia and Valcierre will never stand together.”
Rydric’s jaw tightened. “She didn’t do it, Felrian.”
Felrian’s breath hitched, then steadied. “I have no proof. Only smoke. But it could not be anyone else. You know it.”
Rydric went still.
For a moment Felrian seemed to drift. His eyes lost focus, and his fingers moved against the blanket as if searching for another hand.
“Aelis is there,” he whispered. “Her blue gown is torn. She says the smoke hid mercy.”
“Felrian.”
“She says your daughter did it with Galeran’s knife.”
“Aelis is dead.”
“Yes,” Felrian said, suddenly looking at him again. “That is the only part none of us disputes.”
Rydric rose. The stool scraped against the earth.
“I will not sit here while fever makes you see a ghost.”
“Then sit while a king speaks.” Felrian coughed, and the effort left sweat on his lip. “The prisoners remain. Thousands now, if Morain can still count. Men, boys, camp servants, garrison hands. They eat what your army needs. They require guards you cannot spare. Seylim delays because delays feeds him and starves us. The exchange failed. The city watches us rot.”
“We send another offer.”
“You have. You will. He will answer with courtesy and less than you need.”
“You counsel slaughter because my daughter survived your sister?”
“I counsel it because the camp is dying.” Felrian’s voice roughened. “Do not make me cleaner than I am. Grief has only made the answer easier to say.”
Rydric stood with his hands clenched at his sides.
“I cannot kill prisoners. It violates oath, chivalry, the laws of war—”
“The songs,” Felrian said.
Rydric flinched as if struck.
Felrian reached out and caught his wrist.
His hand was hot, weak, and shaking.
“I loved you,” he said. “I loved her. I loved what we were before. But love is not command. Kill them. Move the army. Survive the holy expedition. If you cannot give the order, give it to me.”
Rydric pulled free. The gesture hurt both of them. Felrian’s hand fell back onto the blanket.
“I will consider it.”
“Considering is what killed her.”
Rydric left.
At dawn, he sent a final offer to Seylim through Shaykh Burhan. Prisoners for prisoners. Coin for rank. Guarantees for the wounded. Safe-conduct for those who could not march. Nasir was made to stand beside Brother Osbert as the offer was copied. He saw Rydric’s hand tremble when the word children was struck out and replaced with noncombatants.
The answer returned near sunset. Seylim offered less than Rydric demanded and more than some of his own emirs wished. He sent also a note in Rashid’s legal hand, reminding the king of Esberia that prisoners under truce were a trust before the One and a test before history.
Rydric read it twice.
Then he gave the order.
Brother Osbert sat at a trestle table near the prisoner compound with two ink-horns, three broken reeds, and a face drained of all colour. Sir Odo commanded the outer cordon. Baudren stood beside the gate of the compound, helmet under one arm, looking older than he had at dawn. Morain stood farther off with his tally stick, lips moving soundlessly as men were counted out.
The prisoners understood slowly. At first they thought they were being moved. Some gathered their bundles. A woman tied a strip of cloth around a boy’s wrist so he would not be lost. An old man tried to lift his brother and failed. A garrison soldier asked Nasir where they were going.
Nasir did not answer.
The first group was taken beyond the thorn fence. Fifty men. Soldiers first, before they could resist. They were marched toward the dry wadi beyond the horse-lines, where the ground dipped low enough that the camp would not see everything at once. Some went quietly, heads bent, lips moving through prayers to the One. Others cursed. One began reciting the Names in a voice that broke before the tenth. A young man laughed, high and breathless, until an Esberian man-at-arms struck him in the mouth with a spear haft.
Nasir heard the first killing before he saw it. A cry cut short. Then another. Then the thick, chopping rhythm of men doing work they wished were battle. The second group heard too and started screaming.
Men surged against the thorn fence. Guards drove them back with spear shafts. Children were crushed between bodies. Someone tore his hands bloody trying to dig beneath the stakes. A woman threw herself over a boy and would not rise when ordered, so two soldiers dragged her aside by the arms and left the boy staring at the sky with dust on hsi face.
Father Aldemar walked beside the second group, star-beads clenched in one hand, speaking prayers in High Vestimarian that almost none of the prisoners understood. One prisoner spat at him. Another begged him for water. A third asked whether the Revealed Light saw men of the One Covenant. Aldemar stopped speaking and walked on in silence.
Rydric stood on the rise above the compound where all lines could be seen: the gate, the table, the thorn fence, the track to the killing ground, the smoke pits being dug beyond. A king did not need to swing his sword. His hand had moved once in the command tent; now hundreds must die.
Baudren cam to him after the third group. “There are boys in the next pen.”
“I know.”
“Some are servants.”
“I know.”
“One is perhaps eight.”
Rydric’s face did not move.
“If they watch until evening,” Baudren said, “they will die before the sword reaches them.”
Rydric looked at him.
The youngest and frailest were brought out next.
Nasir was ordered to translate now.
He stood before a cluster of women, boys, old men, and two wounded soldiers whose bandages had gone brown at the edges. Sir Odo gave the instruction in Vestimarian, his voice flat.
“Tell them to walk. Tell them those who walk quietly will not be bound.”
Nasir looked at him.
“Tell them,” Odo said.
Nasir turned to the prisoners. He said in Jaludi, “Walk with your names in your mouths.”
Some understood. Some did not. One woman began saying names at once: her own, her husband’s, her sons’, the village where she was born, the name of her mother. Others took it up. A boy repeated his father’s name until it became a sob.
At the wadi, the killing became disorder. Swords dulled. Axes stuck. Men slipped in mud made from dust and blood. A knight vomited into his own mail and had to be led away. Another struck too shallow and had to strike again while the prisoner thrashed under him, heels drumming against the earth. A child ran. Not far. A squire caught him by the back of the tunic and held him until an older soldier, weeping openly, sliced his soft neck in one sweep.
Above, kites began circling before the pyres were lit. By midday the camp stank. Blood, loosened bowels, sweat, fear, hot iron, opened bodies, trampled thyme, smoke from the first burning pits. The smell moved through the tents and settled into cloth, hair, bread, water skins. Men who had not gone near the wadi tasted it when they drank.
The prisoners still inside the compound began to sing. It was a verse from the Book of the One Covenant. Nasir knew it. He had heard his mother sing a version while grinding lentils in Azran. The song spread until the whole compound shook with it. Nasir sang with them, softly. The Esberian guards hated it. Some shouted for silence. One threw a stone. The singing grew louder.
Rydric heard it from the rise.
He closed his eyes.
“Stop them,” Baudren said to a man-at-arms.
“No,” Rydric said.
So they sang until each group was taken.
Afternoon lengthened. Shadows moved. The ground at the wadi darkened. The men doing the killing changed shifts because arms tired, wrists shook, and even hardened soldiers lost strength.
Baudren went down twice and came back each time with blood up to his elbows. Once he found Nasir standing too near the path and said, “Get back.”
Nasir looked at him. “From what, my lord?”
Baudren had no more strength to answer.
Late in the day, a prisoner broke from the line and ran toward the Esberian camp instead of away from it. He was a young garrison man, barely bearded, hands tied before him. He ran directly toward Rydric on the rise. Three guards moved to stop him, but he was fast with the last speed fear gives.
He fell to his knees twenty paces from the king. Nasir heard him screaming in Jaludi.
“What does he say?” Rydric asked.
Nasir’s mouth was dry. “He asks why.”
No one spoke.
The young man looked at Rydric and asked again, louder.
Why?
Rydric drew his sword.
For a moment, Baudren thought he meant to kill the man himself. Perhaps Rydric thought so too. But the king only stood with the blade in his hand, unable to step forward, unable to step back.
Alianor ended it. She came behind the prisoner and cut cleanly through the neck. The body fell sideways. The head struck the ground and rolled.
Rydric’s sword remained in his hand.
At sunset, the compound was empty. The bodies were burned beyond Al-Ayyadi because burial would take too long and the army was afraid of more sickness. Wood ran short. Green brush smoked badly. Fat hissed in the flames. Limbs twisted as fire took them, and men who had killed all day turned away from that last movement because it looked too much like life. The smoke rose black at first, then grey, then a long low smear that the wind carried toward Darat al-Bahr.
On the city walls, no horns sounded. No arrows came. Seylim’s men watched the smoke.
Rydric stood until the pyres collapsed inward. When Baudren came to tell him it was done, his face was streaked where sweat had cut through blood and ash.
Morain’s count differed from Sir Odo’s. Brother Osbert’s broken list had names without bodies, bodies without names, children listed beneath fathers who were not theirs. The dead had once had exact names, exact mothers, exact houses, exact debts, exact jokes, exact scars. In the Esberian record they had become a number no one could agree on.
The number was copied, sealed, and sent toward Seylim’s camp beneath a banner of truce. Nasir watched the messenger ride out and get shot by arrows immediately.
Later, songs would be made. They would call the massacre dreadful necessity, righteous vengeance, the sorrow of kings, the Field of Weeping, the black choice.
Felrian recovered on the ship home. He lay in a cabin that smelled of salt, tar, vinegar, and dried herbs. Fever left him thinner, colder, and no less awake. He did not plan revenge in the way men like Rydric imagined. The east had taught him that armies were costly and songs unreliable. Law could wait longer than grief if grief taught it patience. Felrian closed his eyes and began to count.