“You made them!” Ramyi hissed. “We were cleaning up your mess!”
Anna was distantly aware that she’d struck the girl. It didn’t seem real until she moved away, numbly edging past her fighters and taking care to avoid stepping on half-buried faces. She saw the smears of blood across her palm. Yatrin’s broad hand fell upon her shoulder, but she shrugged it off. Her silence had become the gathering’s muteness; she stood with the rigid posture they’d come to expect, waiting until they resumed the business of wrapping bodies in sheets and scavenging supplies from their dead brethren, then approached Mesar.
“I need you to prepare a column for tomorrow,” Anna said.
The Alakeph veteran regarded her warily. “This isn’t the time for retaliation.”
“It’s not for fighting,” she said. “It’s for Nahora.”
Chapter 4
Anna sat on the edge of a cliff, high along the ridges between Tas Hassan and Karawat, where shifting fog revealed valleys blotted with cypresses and red anemones and tall, swaying grass. It was curious to watch the world shifting below her, to sense the divide between her ankles and scorching rock blurring until her body was the heat, the shrub-dotted fissures, the streams and flats snaking out under a midday sun. Soon she was also the wind, the very same that was dancing through her hair, and the starlight that darkened her skin. She was time, weathering the hillsides and worming roots through soil.
She was a fighter’s gentle steps over stone.
“I’m listening, Yatrin,” Anna said, her awareness sinking back into her body.
“They want to rendezvous four leagues to the east,” Yatrin replied. He moved closer, but kept a generous distance from the edge. “It’s not too late to break off our arrangements.”
Anna shut her eyes against the light. “Do you trust your people?”
“I want to.”
From Anna’s observations, Yatrin was one of the few fighters—within the Nest or deployed in the field—who held any reservations about making contact. It was natural, considering the birthplace of nearly half her forces. Even those who’d turned their backs on the state still traded Orsas in the corridors, practiced their calligraphy by transcribing sacred mandates, and found themselves gazing to the northeast with every sunset. But Yatrin was his own oak, his roots severed from the state and its ploys. Or so it seemed. Anna considered that it was merely a ruse held in her presence, but Mesar and his men had shown the truth of things when they nudged Yatrin’s ribs in the bunks.
Afraid of a little homecoming, Yatroshu?
It’s our first chance to take real ground. Don’t grind your heel upon it.
She joined her fighters, thirty-five in all, in the fold between granite crests. Her southern fighters had donned their camouflage smocks, which were knotted with mud-soaked burlap strips and withered moss, while the northerners and easterners rested in loose shawls and cotton tunics. Being unarmored seemed to induce dread. The caution and exhaustion and bitterness were bare on their faces, as bare as their mounds of vests, ruji, tins, wrapped rations, rope, and spare boots, some of which had been plucked from the dead at Sadh Nur Amah and still smelled of vinegar. But her fighters were arranged in radiating knots around Mesar, and only those with southern blood—part of Jenis’s unit, or the sister unit they’d recruited from Kowak—glanced at Anna as she appeared. There was always a nexus to morale, a center of balance shifting and swaying hearts below the immediate terror of killing.
The afterglow of Anna’s meditation lingered, and she envisioned herself as empty wind once more, her body dissolving into Mesar’s. . . .
“Once we pass Karawat, the sentiment should soften,” one of Jenis’s fighters was saying to Mesar. They were both squatting on loose earth, their water-soaked wrappings draped over their heads and upper backs. “Even so, you ought to be the spearhead.”
Mesar rubbed his stubble, examining the lines they’d scrawled into the dirt. “Nothing outruns mistruth, it seems.”
“They’ve made up their minds.” The fighter shrugged. “Golyna’s got a different eye than the stick-dwellers.”
“It needs to be an introduction, not a surrender.”
“Eh?”
“Enemies surrender,” Mesar said. “Every bit of chatter feeds their perception, regardless of whose lips are moving. It simply isn’t about figureheads, you see. This isn’t the north, nor the south. The state’s ears are keen on all voices, and once this war begins in earnest, you’ll see that.”
Jenis’s fighter gave a throaty laugh. “Did one spot of good, though. They took half the horses’ worth. Probably worried we’d scalp them if they turned it down.”
His southern comrades chuckled under their damp shade.
“What happened?” Anna asked Yatrin quietly, maintaining her distance from Mesar’s inner circle.
“Khutai and his men were fighting uphill,” Yatrin said with folded arms. “Volna’s emissaries passed through this morning.”
“Are they trying to buy out their garrison?”
“Not quite. They were passing on the news about Sadh Nur Amah.”
“A warning, then.”
Yatrin shook his head. “They told the governor it was our doing. Not just here, either. They probably sent riders to every notch of central Hazan.”
An old vein of anger flared up in Anna, burning and tight across her face, but she was quick to settle it. It wasn’t the first time they’d polished their own devastation into something noble, but it was the most egregious. They were becoming bolder, more brash, more certain in their ability to control minds as easily as trade routes. They were winning. They’d proven as much through semantics alone.
No longer Patvor, the monsters.
They were Volna, the liberators.
Khara rested on the outskirts of the gathering, still working on her aspen carving. Her vest and outer wrappings were piled beside her, revealing the dark, slick sheen of her shoulders in the sunlight. She glanced up and met Anna’s eyes.
“Watch her,” Anna said to Yatrin, turning away to conceal her lips. It was impossible to predict how she’d act without her partner. That was the trouble of pairing, Anna supposed. Lovers fought like wild dogs, but the bereaved resigned themselves to death.
“Are you sure she’s the one to watch?” Yatrin asked. The question begged itself: They were both staring at Ramyi, who’d garnered her own flock of fighters under the shade of a crooked juniper tree.
The girl wore her bruise like a pendant, smirking as she tossed stones with the younger men and women from Jenis’s unit. As far as Anna could read, it was all a mask. Drifting, vapid behavior was a ruse she knew too well. The night before, Ramyi had shambled off to the lower bunks with shuddering legs, forming a mirrored memory of walking endlessly in some autumn sprawl. But it was better if she didn’t break. Not around the others.
“She’ll do fine,” Anna said. “I did. She has to prove herself, and she’ll suffer until it happens.”
“She’s not the only one who suffers,” Yatrin said.
“It was panic.” A twinge of pity flashed through her as she studied Ramyi. “Don’t lash the world to her shoulders, Yatrin. She’s a child.”
“The world crashes down on all of us, doesn’t it?”
Anna blinked at the Nahoran and his shadows of truth. You cannot be broken by what you are, she recalled from the Kojadi tomes. But being was no simple task.
“Are we prepared