“Vying for some peddlers’ hearts?” Jenis’s captain said with a sneer.
Mesar, still squatting and regarding the scarred dirt before him, drew a hard breath. “You heard her.”
* * * *
At dusk they convened with the horse peddlers in the crux of a gentle gully. Yatrin, Khara, and several of Mesar’s men circled the mass of swishing tails and hot dust and leather reins, confirming their order of fifty-two horses and six mules. A group of Nahoran children waited with wagons on the crest of the slope, silhouetted against a bruising sky, keeping watch over heaps of saddles and stirrups the northerners had scoffed at.
“Look at them,” Anna said to Yatrin, pointing at the clump of peddlers dealing with Mesar. They kept their arms crossed, their eyes low, their legs rigid. It was more severe than mistrust of strangers. Their village was three days’ ride from salvation—be it kator railways, a frontline garrison, or a mesa holdout—and their fate, whether delivered as blades or alloy bars, had already been sealed. That was why Mesar and Jenis had chosen it, Anna realized during their descent from the ridge. A border garrison with kator lines would’ve been easier, but given them less leverage. Less terror, in plainer terms.
“They’re as hardy as they look,” Yatrin said. “My father bought a gelding from this region after my first campaign. It could clear two fields before its hooves slowed. The heat sits well with them.”
Anna hummed as though she’d been speaking of the beasts. “Impressive breeders.”
“They’re part of the state too,” he replied. “Beasts or men, it’s all the state. It resides in everything here.”
She eyed Yatrin sidelong. It was an old maxim, as useless as any other.
But Yatrin’s stare was mired in his truth of the world. “The grain in their bellies, the water in their troughs, the whips on their flesh. Their mother’s wombs were formed by the state too. So was every kind word and every lump of sugar.”
“And you think that’s what plays through their minds when they run?”
“Not through their minds, really,” Yatrin said. “It is their mind. That’s what Malchym never understood about our ranks. We weren’t afraid to lose something we didn’t own.”
Baqir’s body, loaned from Golyna and its shimmering towers, played through Anna’s mind with vivid clarity. The parched soil of Hazan drank and drank, never sated. Nahora’s only divergence was its gift for glamorizing its thirst.
“Do you really believe it?” Anna asked.
Yatrin’s lids sank over his eyes, aging him in an instant. “If Nahora didn’t, they would already have been subjugated. Courage sustains them.”
“My father told it differently,” Anna replied. “He said the forests are lined with brave bones. When leaves show their bellies, the clever seek shelter. The brave flatten their tongues and wait for the rain.”
“And yet there’s no rain in the flatlands.”
Anna watched their quartermaster lug two sacks of alloy from a pile, dragging them over crumbling earth and tossing them at the peddlers’ feet. “Nor are there any leaves.”
One of the peddlers stooped down and sifted through his take. He rubbed his chin, mumbled something in Orsas, listened to Jenis’s fighters as they bickered and pointed at him. Soon Mesar’s men joined in, their rising flatspeak drowning out the horses’ whinnies.
Seeds of conflict were simple to spot, if one knew where to look. Anna led Yatrin down the slope in a wash of dust, straining to hear the dispute.
“. . . and it’s unfair,” one of the peddlers was saying. “It’s just not enough.”
“First we offered fifty, and you took it,” Jenis’s captain barked.
“And then you came to your senses. It’s dishonorable to rescind your price.”
“It’s enough,” a hooded peddler said to his companion. “We can go.”
“These are the best of the herds,” the first peddler grunted.
“We can arrange to deliver the other ten agir tomorrow,” Mesar suggested. His even tone was a token gesture, buried beneath the growing sea of shouts and accusations.
“We can leave some of the pack horses,” Anna said. Her presence stilled the men, though only for a moment. She forced her voice beyond comfort to stamp out the last of their mutters. “Go and fetch some of our cloths, Khutai. Bring whatever we can spare.”
Before Mesar’s captain could move, the first peddler threw up his hands. “We have all the cloth we want. We’re not beggars.”
“Jersuh,” his companion hissed. His eyes were bulging. “Do you know who that is?”
“A foolish girl,” the peddler said.
“Fifty is enough.”
“It’s not and you know it. Straighten your spine, would you?” The peddler’s companions were shifting away from him, glancing at Anna and the dark, wandering scars across her neck. But he was a brave man with no mind for leaves. He was studying Yatrin, Khara, and a dozen others in their press of shadowed blades. “I see eastern sun on your faces, brothers and sisters. But you march with such butchers.”
“Butchers?”
A girl’s delicate whisper had never put so much fear in Anna.
Ramyi slid through the crowd, her splotchy purple welt bathed in the dying light from the east. Her Hazani eyes, so much narrower than their southern counterparts, had widened enough to reveal bloodshot tendrils. There was no Kojadi veil over the girl’s expression, only wrath. “You think my people are butchers?”
“It’s all right, Ramyi,” Mesar whispered. “Remember the mothers’ words of clarity.”
“I have no mother,” Ramyi said. “The eastern saviors made sure of that.”
“He meant nothing by it. Our people share common aims.”
“I meant it,” the peddler said, spitting on the burlap sacks near Ramyi. “Look at this little animal you carry around.” He shook his head at the Nahorans around Anna. “What is this girl here for, ah? Is she some reward for the throats you slit in the flatlands? Do you share her, or is she somebody’s property? Is she married to her brother?”
Ramyi’s fists curled within her sleeves.
“That’s enough,” Anna said, culling the rage she saw blooming in the crowd. Most of the Hazani and pale-skinned northerners had, at the very least, stiffened their shoulders and pursed their lips. But several among them, especially those with henna-dyed eyes and pins arrayed in ladder-like columns under the skin of their forearms—recruited from cartel networks and sanctuary encampments—were on the cusp of killing. Ramyi’s eyes were hardest to disarm, but memories of violence lingered like their own instructor. “Leave ten pack horses. I urge you to accept my offer. It’s the fairest you’ll receive.”
The peddlers mulled about in contemplative silence. Finally, their leader cleared his throat. “An interesting view on fairness.” He looked at his horses, all stamping around in a hazy circle. “Very well, then. It seems to be Hazani fairness.”
“I’ll gut you,” Ramyi snapped, breaking any sense of reprieve.
“Me?” the peddler asked. “What—”
“Don’t you dare speak about me or my family.” But the girl’s anger rested beneath a press of hurt, of swollen eyes and quivering brows.
“Nahora has seen your breed before,” the peddler chuckled. “Northern children with foul