57
Somehow, the sewer was wetter, colder, and smellier than it had been when Akella had traversed it at dawn. Nonetheless, it was safer below Pellon’s streets than it was atop them. Akella led the way, keeping her lantern turned as low as she could on the off chance that a mountain man patrol up above might see light shining up from one of the shafts that led back to the surface. They made it all the way to the culvert that drained into the river before they encountered a problem: Both sides of the riverbank were teeming with mountain men. If they walked out of the culvert, they’d be spotted immediately, then captured, and then all would have been for naught.
“Reserve forces,” whispered the Commander, so softly her voice was hardly audible.
“How do we get around them?” Akella asked.
“We don’t. We wait here until dawn, when the battle starts, and hope that they move their rear line closer to the city.”
“And if they don’t move?”
“Then we wait longer. They will move eventually.”
As though the matter was settled, the Commander sat down on a damp stone and drew the Empress down with her. The Empress had not spoken a single word since they left the castle, and her eyes still had that hollow look of someone who had lost everything precious to them in the world.
Akella glanced from the Commander and Empress to the exit, a tantalizing hundred yards away.
“Put the lantern out and sit down,” the Commander said. “Before you get us all killed.”
Akella didn’t see another solution, so she obeyed.
#
More waiting. The Empress put her head on her concubine’s shoulder and closed her eyes, either sleeping or pretending to sleep. Without the lamplight, Akella could just make out the outlines of the two of them with the sliver of moonlight and mountain man firelight that shone into the culvert.
Akella envied the two of them, envied them and hated them, too. Every time she saw some tender gesture pass between them, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking of Megs again, thinking of what she’d lost.
Exhaustion took Akella, and she slept.
Perhaps she slept for an hour, maybe two, and then she was awake again, the sound of laughter from the mountain men’s camp rousing her. She glanced down at her boots, which sat in the stinking water that trickled towards the river beyond. Akella wondered if she’d see the water red with blood once the sun rose.
The Commander shifted positions across from her, and Akella glanced up. The Terintan was awake, but the Empress still slumbered deeply, her head having slipped down onto the Commander’s chest.
“How did the two of you fall in love?” Akella whispered impulsively, nodding at the sleeping Empress. “A Terintan foot soldier with the firstborn of the House of Dorsa – it’s more than a little unlikely. Practically a minstrel’s tale.”
The Commander only frowned, looking rather disinclined to answer. She probably thought Akella meant to poke fun at her. Under normal circumstances, the Commander would probably be right. But in this case, the question was an honest one.
“Sorry,” Akella mumbled. “I was just curious.”
A minute or two passed in silence. Akella could feel the Commander’s eyes on her, watching.
“Listen, Joslyn. I know we’ve never really…” Akella tried to think of something that wouldn’t be as offensive as she always was in her own head but couldn’t.
“Liked one another?” the Commander asked wryly.
“Liked one another,” Akella agreed with a relieved nod, somewhat glad the feeling was mutual yet also somewhat annoyed, “but – and I’m only admitting this out loud because there is a very real possibility that one of us or both of us will die in the next few hours, and then the survivor can deny this conversation ever happened – but I wanted you to know that I…well, I respect you. Mostly. You’re just – you’re very good at what you do,” she finished hastily. Preyla’s tit. What am I even saying right now? “And honestly, the Empress might very well be as mad as everyone says she is –” the Commander’s eyes narrowed dangerously at this, so Akella spoke even faster “– but even if she’s wrong about everything else, she’s right about stopping the Kingdom of Persopos. The way she’s going about it is…mad, obviously – or, perhaps not mad exactly, but… and so I just wondered how you… A woman so different from yourself, it’s…”
Akella trailed off, deciding the cold, the stink, the lack of sleep had finally addled her brains. The Commander looked as though she was either waiting to see what else Akella might say or preparing to slam a fist into her face, and Akella looked away.
Another long silence stretched out between them.
“She is fierce and gentle in turns,” the Commander said softly. “Stubborn as a desert stone, as tender towards her people as a mother with a newborn. Bold, reckless, loyal. Not mad,” she said firmly, eyes flashing in Akella’s direction, “but forever maddening.” She glanced down at the Empress. “That is why I fell in love with her. And why I love her still. What possessed you to… Why ask that, of all things?”
“Because I…”
Akella almost made up a plausible excuse about satisfying her curiosity, but she might as well be honest. After all, like she’d said earlier, it was quite likely that at least one of them would die before all this was over. There was no longer any point in saving words for later, and she wanted to tell someone about how she felt for Megs. She would have preferred to tell her brother, or Adriel, or at least the little seagull, but none of those were options, so she released what had been weighing her down onto the Commander.
“Because I think I might have fallen in love recently, for the first time in all my twenty-eight summers,” she said, her words coming out like a sigh. “And it feels like being on a ship caught in the storm with the sails still full. Half the time I think I’ve completely lost my wits; the other half of the time I’d be more than happy to give my wits and anything else that might be required just for the chance to feel her skin against mine one more time. I’m almost certain she died during the first assault on the castle. She died and I never even told her how I felt.” Akella turned away, embarrassed. Stared at the mud between her boots. “You would think knowing she probably died would make me let her go. Instead, all it does is make me want to meet my own death sooner. So that I can find her again in Preyla’s great Ocean Beyond the Ocean.”
The Commander said nothing when Akella finished. She was silent for so long, in fact, that Akella assumed she’d grown bored and her mind had wandered to more important topics. But when Akella finally chanced a glance away from her boots, the Commander’s gaze was fixed upon her, like she’d just been waiting the whole time for Akella to look back up.
“Do not be so sure she died in the fighting,” the Commander said. “Even the worst battles have their survivors.”
Akella dropped her face into her hands. “I-I searched for her everywhere. She was part of Eagle Battalion, the battalion stationed in the Empress’s rear guard before we came to Pellon. She would’ve been in the outer keep when the fighting broke out. I looked everywhere for her. Everywhere. The only place I didn’t check were the piles of bodies. I have to accept…” She swallowed. “I have to accept she’s probably gone. The sooner I accept it, the sooner I can come back to my senses.”
She felt a hand on her shoulder. What surreal dream was this? Had Akella truly confessed her love and her fears about Megs to the Commander, of all people, and was the Commander in turn actually patting her shoulder in an attempt to comfort her?
“Have faith,” said the Commander. “There was a time when Tasia believed me lost forever. And when I finally found her again, I had no choice but to walk away, for her own protection. Yet we have found our way back to one another. Time and time again, we have found our way back. Perhaps it will be like this with your own love.”
“Yeah,” Akella said dully. “Maybe.”
#
Dawn came, and with it, the sounds of battle in the distance. The final assault had begun.
Akella woke with the mountain man camp, as men and women bustled about and orders were shouted in that strange, ancient-sounding tongue of theirs. She leaned forward as far as she dared to try to see what was happening.
“They’ll move their rear line closer, into the city,” the Commander whispered. “Once they’re gone, we make our move.”
The Empress, finally awake, nodded her understanding. Akella was glad to see the gesture; she had begun to wonder if the Empress was truly catatonic, unable to even acknowledge the presence of those around her.
Stubborn as a desert stone,Akella thought, remembering the Commander’s description of her. There was strength in the woman yet.
Akella watched as mountain men – and a surprising number of mountain women – began to mobilize. They rolled up sleeping mats and tents, packing them into pony-drawn carts; they checked weapons, painted their bare chests with blue runes, filled waterskins in the river, relieved themselves. After thirty or forty minutes of such activity, the group on the far side of the river began moving slowly in the same direction. Across the bridge, Akella realized. They were crossing the bridge and heading for the city, where they would likely mop up any soldiers attempting an escape towards the Emperor’s Road.
A relaxed brutality, Akella thought. That was the tribesmen’s posture. They’d already won the battle for Pellon and they knew it. This back line was just a fishing net designed to scoop up any bits of the Imperial Army that made a final, desperate swim for safety.
She shivered, and not just from the cold water that had turned her feet to blocks of ice inside her boots.
Finally, once the morning sun had filled the whole of the sky, the mountain men were gone.
“Alright, it’s time to go,” the Commander said at least a full ten minutes after the last sounds of mountain men had faded. She moved towards culvert’s opening, pausing at the entrance before glancing over her shoulder and nodding to Akella and the Empress.
Like the bedraggled sewer rats they’d become, the three of them stepped into the morning sun. Akella immediately turned towards the city, and over the crest of the embankment she could just make out the tail end of the mountain men arriving at Pellon’s main gate. The gate stood wide open, of course. Waiting for the conquerors to enter.
“We’ll travel parallel to the Emperor’s Road,” the Commander told them. “Close enough to keep it in sight and not lose our bearings, far enough to stay hidden from any tribesmen heading towards the city.”
She began to climb the embankment, but the Empress did not follow her. The Empress stared at the space beneath the bridge. Akella followed her gaze and saw what the Empress’s eyes had landed upon: a boat. A small fishing boat, tied up beneath the bridge, mostly hidden from sight by dried reeds. The kind of worn, barely serviceable old boat a smuggler might use to cross the river under the nose of city guards, or that a pauper’s child might use for illegal fishing to feed his family.
“Joslyn, wait,” the Empress said, and Akella realized with a start that those two words might be the first the Empress had spoken since she’d accepted her concubine’s plan to sneak her out of the castle.
When the Commander turned, the Empress lifted a finger, pointing at the boat silently.
“What is it, Tasia?” the Commander asked. Already a few steps up the riverbank, she couldn’t see the craft that the Empress pointed at.
The Empress said nothing, just continued to point like some ominous ship’s head.
“There’s a boat,” Akella said for her.