Cassian did not drag Simon across.
He brought Marchesa to him.
"Cross over."
On the far side of the collapsed bridge, she narrowed her eyes.
"The terms require you to return my nephew."
"He says he doesn't want to return."
Cassian pointed his sword at Simon's back.
The tip did not touch him.
"So come and receive him yourself."
Marchesa's cavalry stirred.
A commander crossing alone into enemy ground looked very much like surrender.
She dismounted.
She handed her sword to her adjutant.
She did not remove her armor.
"Once I cross the bridge, Simon is under my protection."
"As long as he lives."
The white sentence around Cassian's throat tightened.
Hassan clicked his tongue.
"Stop adding needless words. The terms will remember your jokes too."
Cassian did not answer.
Marchesa stepped onto the broken bridge.
Below her, black water moved beneath the ice like teeth.
One step.
A white sentence brightened on her armor.
Two steps.
The scale bearing Cassian's name climbed toward her throat.
The final gap was more than five paces wide.
Marchesa ran.
She leaped.
Cassian did not offer his hand.
She crossed alone.
The instant she landed in the snow, she seized the chain still hanging from Simon's wrist.
The white sentence around Cassian's throat loosened.
`The surrendered Simon Bell has been returned alive.`
The contract was fulfilled.
Simon had not taken one step back.
Marchesa had simply come to receive him.
"I told you to return a man, and you moved the border instead."
"You crossed it."
"Were you planning to steal the commander too?"
"Only the supply lines."
Cassian looked at the cavalry across the bridge.
Behind them rose two red beacons and three white ones.
The cracks in the north kept widening even without Marchesa there.
Simon pulled his chain free from his aunt's hand.
"I am not going back."
"I know."
Marchesa did not hold on.
"That is why I came."
For the first time, Simon bowed his head.
It was not submission.
It was a greeting to the person who understood the price of his choice.
An arrow flew from across the bridge.
Marchesa's adjutant had not fired it.
An officer carrying a white beacon stabbed one carrying red, seized his bow, and aimed at Simon.
A king was easier to use dead than alive.
Cassian caught Simon by the nape and threw him flat into the snow.
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The arrow tore through his hair.
Marchesa stopped the second arrow with the back of her hand.
The white scales of her armor shifted over it.
The arrowhead broke.
She did not bleed.
She looked at her adjutant across the bridge.
"Cut the bridge."
The adjutant hesitated.
His commander stood on the other side.
"That is an order."
The cavalry poured oil over the remaining piers.
They set them alight.
Marchesa burned the road back to her own army.
Firelight spread across the white sentences on her armor.
She never looked back.
Pressing the hole in his throat, Thoma said,
"An army without a commander is expensive."
"Cheaper than one with a commander."
"For whom?"
"The people burying it."
That evening, they entered an abandoned customs house.
A map of the north hung on the wall.
Border fortresses.
Salt roads.
Grain stores.
Cart roads carrying the wounded south.
There was not one person's name on the map.
Roads remained after people died.
Marchesa removed her glove.
The back of the hand that had stopped the arrow was torn.
Blood ran between her fingers.
She did not touch the map.
She broke the ice in a corner of the customs house and washed her hand.
The water turned red.
Twice.
Three times.
Only when the blood beneath her nails was gone did she unfold the map.
With her ruined left arm bound against her chest, Ria asked,
"You won't touch a map with blood on your hands?"
"I might mark the wrong village for erasure."
"But clean hands make it acceptable?"
"They reduce mistakes."
Marchesa did not smile.
It was not a joke.
With a clean forefinger, she pressed a city on the map.
Verdan.
The place where she had burned the winter grain stores.
"Two thousand three hundred rebels."
Her finger moved inward through the city.
"Fourteen thousand civilians."
It stopped on the mark for the granary.
"Four months of grain."
"You burned it."
"Yes."
"The rebels?"
"Withdrew two months later."
"The civilians?"
"Half remained after winter."
Marchesa did not lower the numbers.
She did not turn the people she had killed into enemy casualties.
That did not make her armor stronger.
Its broken scales remained broken.
"Your turn."
She pointed to the south of the map.
The western capital, where the Red Table's grain stores had stood.
The place where Cassian had refused to put out the fire.
"How many died?"
"Winter isn't over."
"That is why I am asking."
"I don't know."
Ria's pen stopped.
Marchesa looked at Cassian.
"You didn't count?"
"I count the people I kill."
"And the people you starve?"
"They died far away."
"So they are not your sin?"
"They are."
Cassian did not look at the map.
"I simply don't know their names."
Ria opened a fresh page with her right hand.
At the top of the first empty line, she wrote:
`The people Cassian Crow has not counted yet.`
Without speaking, Adel examined Cassian's throat.
The contract sentence was gone, but the wound remained.
She did not touch him.
She did not ask permission.
She left him as though he were a man with no right to be treated by a dead saint.
The customs-house door opened.
Three carts rolled inside.
The first carried sacks of grain.
The second carried barrels of salt.
The third carried nineteen wounded soldiers.
They were the men who had escaped through the fortress drain the day before.
The soldier Cassian had carried was among them.
He pointed at Cassian.
"This man closed the gate."
With his other hand, he pointed at Simon.
"This man got us out."
He did not mistake Cassian for the man who had saved him.
He did not count being carried on Cassian's back as forgiveness.
The soldier clenched his teeth.
One grain of black salt emerged between his molars.
The other wounded soldiers spat out the same.
Nineteen grains in all.
Hassan held the first beneath an oil lamp.
White letters were trapped inside it.
"A snow-road cipher."
Thoma held out his hand.
The soldier did not give him the grain.
"Each of the nineteen of us swallowed one section of the road."
"If one of you dies?" Cassian asked.
"No one can travel that section."
They did not beg to be saved.
They made sure Cassian's road would die if he let them die.
Standing beside the cart, Adel asked,
"Do you consent to treatment?"
All nineteen answered for themselves.
Adel allowed no one to answer for another.
After checking their pulses, she decided the order in which she would save them.
The gate Cassian had closed returned through Simon's hands as nineteen roads.
To buy them, he had to save nineteen people first.
The woman who had driven the carts threw an empty ledger in front of Thoma.
"Four relief stations have closed."
Thoma's face hardened.
"I know."
"One hundred thirteen children who received rations there are missing."
"You mean dead?"
"I mean we do not know where they are."
The woman did not look at Cassian.
"Twenty-two northern contacts vanished with the distribution network. Six snow guides, nine drivers, seven bookkeepers."
Thoma spoke to Cassian.
"The relief stations were not charity."
"I know."
"They were an intelligence network."
"That too."
"You closed it when you killed its leader."
Cassian looked at the empty northern road on the map.
The guides who knew it were gone.
The bill for a perfect victory had arrived.
Thoma raised one finger.
"One grain cart."
"For what?"
"The locations of two missing contacts. One northern snow road. The mouths of the children who will still be alive tomorrow."
"Expensive."
"You said we would make it a transaction."
Cassian had four carts left.
One of grain.
One of powder.
One of weapons.
One black funeral carriage built to keep running even after its driver's head was cut off.
He did not give up the grain.
He put the powder cart before Thoma.
"Sell this."
Thoma raised an eyebrow.
"We won't be able to open the next gate."
"I'll open it with something else."
"And I can't feed powder to children."
"Sell it to the northern army and it becomes three carts of grain."
"Two will disappear along the way."
"One cart is the price you asked."
Thoma did not nod.
He kicked the powder cart's wheel.
"If I bring back three?"
"Two are yours."
"I won't distribute them in your name."
"Do as you like."
The bargain was done.
Cassian had sold the power to break the next gate.
Not to save people.
To buy back a lost road.
Even so, there would be people with food tomorrow.
Bread remained bread without goodwill.
Marchesa drew supply lines across the map.
Grain in black.
Salt in white.
The wounded in red.
The three lines met in a northern gorge.
Lose it, and in three days the soldiers had no meat.
In five, their wounds rotted.
In seven, they began to eat people.
"The war ends here."
Marchesa touched the gorge.
At that moment, a red dot stained her fingertip.
It was not blood.
It was ink seeping from beneath the map.
Hassan turned it over.
A new village had been drawn on the back.
A village no one had marked.
In place of a name stood a white flag.
Three surrender terms were written on it.
Ria stopped breathing as she read the first.
Cassian knew the handwriting.
It belonged to the hand he had memorized so he would never misspell the name of someone he had killed.
Aaron Bell.
The dead Aaron's writing.
The final condition on the white flag spread like blood.
`We surrender to the commander who comes to save us.`