41
~ LINNA ~
The air was cold on the morning they finally broke camp, the kind of bitter, biting cold that burned the inside of one’s nose and lungs with each inhalation, but which made each exhalation feel heavy and warm and wet. It was also snowing again. When it snowed two weeks earlier, beginning in earnest just as the mountain men raided, the flakes had been fat and steady. Now it was only flurrying, but even so, Linna noticed that some of the Eastern-born soldiers kept glancing up at the slate-grey sky and muttering under their breaths. Their glances were always over their shoulders, aimed north and slightly west, as if they could see an encroaching threat coming from that direction. From atop her horse, Linna tried looking north and west, too, but all she saw was the same grim, grey horizon that blanketed the entire landscape of yellowed rolling plains and bare-branched trees.
Linna didn’t mind riding horseback. She would never be as comfortable on horseback as she was on her own two feet, but Del had given her riding lessons around the palace grounds, so at least she was reasonably competent. Linna wasn’t as good a rider as the Commander yet, and definitely not as good a rider as the Empress, who’d been riding since the time she could walk, but she was better than some. Ammanta, for example, had said she would rather walk. And Akella avoided horses altogether whenever she could. Apparently she’d decided to march with some first sergeant she’d taken a fancy to.
“Empress, are you sure you won’t take the carriage?” asked an officer Linna didn’t know.
“I can’t see as well from the carriage,” replied the Empress, stepping onto the mounting block beside her mare and taking the horse’s reins.
“But you would be so much more comfortable in the carriage,” the officer persisted. “And so much less exposed.”
“That’s why I have guards to protect me.” The Empress winked at Linna as she swung up into the saddle.
Linna immediately felt a surge of pride. With the Commander a hundred miles away and Ammanta deciding to travel on foot, Linna was, at least for the duration of their journey to Pellon, the only personal guard at the Empress’s side. Of course, a knot of about two dozen other black-clad guards on horseback surrounded the Empress, plus the same number again on foot behind the horse-mounted guards, but Linna was currently the only one of them who carried the word “personal” before the word “guard.”
Not for the first time, Linna marveled at the good fortune she’d been blessed with. Maybe it was the fate Father Mezzu had written for her before her birth, maybe Akella’s Preyla had intervened, or maybe it was just dumb luck, but she, a girl who by all rights should’ve been a slave to House Paratheen for the rest of her life, was somehow sitting horseback beside the Empress of the Four Realms. And her good fortune didn’t stop there. She wasn’t just next to the Empress; she was also the Empress’s most trusted servant, sometime guard, and occasional confidant.
The officer on the ground only glanced doubtfully at Linna, then at the other black clad guards who’d formed a protective spear shape around their Empress.
“Your Majesty, I think even your guards would feel more comfortable if –”
The Empress made a frustrated noise in the back of her throat. “Honestly, how many times must I say it, sir? I don’t like riding in carriages. They remind me far too much of my last two trips to the East, both of which saw me a prisoner by the end. I have thirty guards immediately surrounding me, which already seems excessive but I shall not argue with Ammanta on that point, then I have the five hundred soldiers of our camp – Eagle Battalion, I believe they’re called – riding and marching ahead of us, along our flanks, and stretching behind us. And if that were not enough to secure my person, there’s General Ambrose’s entire Third Division, sweeping well ahead of us to eliminate any potential obstacles. Is a carriage really going to offer me that much more protection? Or are you saying that the Imperial Army has become so incompetent that several thousand soldiers traveling in formation are not capable of fending off an assault?”
The officer reddened. “Of course not, Your Majesty.” He hesitated. “Do you have what you need for the journey?”
“I do, thank you.”
He mumbled some sort of I shall take my leave, then and disappeared into the crowd.
The Empress patted the horse’s neck, then gave the sky a worried glance. “Will the weather hold, do you think?” she asked Linna.
“I asked some Easterners. They said it won’t be as bad as last time,” Linna answered, though it wasn’t the whole truth. She hadn’t asked any Eastern soldiers. The only people Linna ever talked to in the camp, besides the Empress, were Akella, Ammanta, Udolf, a washerwoman named Cyndi, and, every now and again, Brother Rennus. But she had overheard some Easterners talking about the weather, and they’d said the current flurries were unlikely to get much worse, so long as the temperature didn’t drop too significantly as they traveled north.
“Hmm,” the Empress said, but her eyes were distant again, as though she’d forgotten the topic of the weather before Linna even answered. Maybe she was thinking about Commander Joslyn, and how they’d see each other again soon. Or maybe her mind was on the week-long march to Pellon, and she was more worried than she let on to the officer about the mountain men who’d been holed up in Bawold picking off soldiers along their flanks, like desert hyenas picking off apa-apa calves from the herd.
A bugle sounded somewhere ahead of them, and the line of soldiers began to move.
“On our way to Pellon at last,” the Empress commented. “I shall be glad to have a real bed again. And I’m sure you look forward to not having to sleep on the ground beside me any longer.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
If the Empress was secretly worried about their journey, she needn’t have been. The Third Division, which consisted of both Eagle Battalion, which was the battalion of the Empress’s camp, and another eight or nine thousand soldiers besides under the command of General Ambrose, marched, rode, and wheeled its way to Pellon without seeing a single mountain man. Their absence struck Linna as almost eerie.
But she did not spend all that much time thinking about it. Like everyone else in Third Battalion, Linna spent the week-long march in a vain attempt to stay warm and dry. The snow flurries dissipated by the end of their first day, but by the beginning of their second, the rain began. And the rain was relentless, dogging the procession for the remainder of their march. With so many feet, hooves, and wheels churning the same wet track, the rain transformed their path into a river of mud. Steps became labored, each inch threatening to turn ankles or suck boots right off of feet. Wagons were constantly getting mired. Linna and the Empress passed more than one supply wagon surrounded by packs of soldiers, all of them grunting, sliding, and slipping as they tried to free the wheels and get them turning once more. Nights were the worst, because there was not a single patch of dry ground where the soldiers could pitch their tents, which led to tempers growing foul and fights breaking out over the privilege of camping next to some rock or tree that might offer a modicum of protection from the incessant wet.
Even the Empress was not spared. By the third night into their march, she developed a sniffle. The sniffle became sneezes by morning, and by the afternoon of their fourth day, she’d developed a full head cold that seemed to leech out her usual self-possession and air of command. Where she’d chatted with Linna, the guards, and the soldiers they passed before, now she grew silent, sullen, one arm always wrapped around her ever-growing belly.
She’s worried she’ll pass the sickness to the baby,Linna thought, but she knew when to hold her tongue. All she could really do for the Empress was to keep fetching hot tea for her whenever they stopped for a break. On one of these occasions, she came back to find Brother Rennus and Udolf hovering about with worried expressions, the Empress shaking her head as though she’d just refused something.
“It’s a cold, Brother Rennus,” she was saying as Linna came up, “just a cold. If I reach a point at which I feel I am in imminent danger of death, I shall take you up on your offer. Until then, save your energies for the twisted ankles and broken legs of men and beasts.”
Linna delivered the Empress’s tea and caught up with Udolf, who informed her that the Empress had refused Brother Rennus’s offer to use the shadow arts to heal her.
“I thought the shadow arts were mainly used to heal things like cuts and broken bones,” Linna said, recalling what the Empress said when she’d told Rennus to save his energies.
“They are, for most healers,” Udolf agreed. “A disease is far more complex than something like a fracture. Disease penetrates the body in a way that is deep, subtle. Harder for the practitioner to see, and therefore harder to control when he performs the healing.”
Linna wasn’t overly fond of the way Udolf automatically assumed the person wielding the shadow arts would be a he. Udolf was thinking of the Brotherhood, of course, forgetting that in little villages and hamlets dotted all throughout the Empire, the healer was usually a she. But she didn’t argue.
“But I take it Brother Rennus can heal diseases,” Linna guessed.
“Not always,” Udolf said. “But often he can.” He leaned too close and lowered his voice. “If she gets any worse tomorrow, tell me. We can’t allow our Empress to fall to illness when we are so close to achieving our goal.”
The Empress did get worse on the fifth day, sprouting a fever in the morning that reddened her cheeks as if she’d been burned by the sun. She did not complain, simply heaved herself back onto her mare without comment, then tugged the driest of her three cloaks around her. One hand limply held the reins, the other kept the cloak cinched tight beneath her chin. Linna did not like the look of her at all. But Linna didn’t go to Udolf. She couldn’t say exactly why; maybe it was the way he was always overly familiar with Linna, or the way he presumed to know what the Empress needed, despite the Empress refusing Brother Rennus’s help the day before.
Instead, Linna fetched one of the Wise Man surgeons when the procession stopped for the noontide meal. As discreetly as she could, she caught the attention of the first surgeon she could find, who turned out to be a middle-aged, portly man by the name of Jesker. He was highborn, that much was clear immediately, with a clipped, affected kind of nobleman’s accent that Linna guessed made him Andalthian. But he didn’t condescend to Linna the way most noblemen and nearly all Wise Men usually did, and he fussed over the Empress in a way that was nearly maternal.
“We need to get her into one of the carriages before she falls off her horse,” the Wise Man told Linna after his initial examination. He glanced right and left, then lowered his voice. “And… correct me if I’m wrong, but our Empress is with child, is she not?”
He must have already known the answer, but it was polite of him to act as though he needed to ask Linna.
Linna hesitated, then nodded. “She doesn’t want to be in a carriage, though.”
“No carriage,” the Empress muttered, half-delirious with fever.
“It’s good you came to me when you did,” Wise Man Jesker said, ignoring the Empress’s mumbles. He rummaged inside the leather satchel as he spoke, producing a folded square of parchment. “One third of this in her tea now, another third when we stop for supper, and the last third when we break our fast in the morning.”
Linna took the parchment with a nod, but her mind flashed to assassins – both the shadow-enhanced kind who used poisoned darts as well as the kind who appeared in the middle of the night, dressed in the uniform of the Imperial Army. What if the Commander were here, talking to the Wise Man instead of Linna? Would she accept the concoction inside the parchment and take the Wise Man’s word for it? What if it wasn’t designed to heal at all? What if Wise Man Jesker were associated with the same person – or people – inside the army who wanted to kill the Empress?