Part 1
The candles had burned to stubs, and Helena had not noticed.
She noticed only when one of them guttered out as she watched, the small flame folding into itself and leaving a thread of gray smoke that climbed toward the painted ceiling and dissolved among the scenes of divine judgment. The Hall of Nineteen Couches had been christened for philosophy and conquered long ago by the slow theater of statecraft: silk cushions, scented oil, the unhurried murmur of men who believed they had all the time in the world. The cushions were gone now, dragged out days ago to make room for the war. The scented oil had been replaced with tallow that smelled of rendered fat. And the long table at the heart of the room, the scarred and ink-stained oak where three generations of her family had debated the fate of provinces, lay buried beneath maps.
She stood over them the way a physician stands over a body that will not stop bleeding.
The capital occupied the center of the largest chart. Seven hills. The Great Palace. The harbor. The triple line of the great city walls that no foreign army had breached in five hundred years. And around it, in the red ink that Theodosios used for confirmed positions, the closing fist.
To the west, the Thracian theme. Demetrios Herakleios had taken his three thousand and declared his support for Phokas in freeing the imprisoned Crown Prince from the usurping Regent, Helena.
To the east, across the Strait, the Opsikion theme had sealed the water within hours of the assassin girl's death, and the Asian shore that had fed the city for centuries was now a wall. Phokas' outriders had been sighted within three days of the walls, and the strength behind them, the Thracian three thousand folded into its ranks, had swelled past nine thousand swords, fence-sitters reading the wind and choosing, the tally cresting toward twelve thousand within the fortnight. And somewhere in the vast Asia Minora, Senator Methodios rode toward the Armeniac command with his influence, and the Armeniacs could field nine thousand. If even half that strength turned, it would no longer be an upcoming siege. It would be an outright defeat.
Her hands lay flat against the oak. She kept them there deliberately, pressing the palms to the wood, because when she lifted them they trembled, and she could not afford to watch them tremble.
Will Irene come?
That was the thought she had been circling since she sent Alexios to find Irene. She did not know whether Irene would come. She did not know whether Irene would believe her or the rumors. She had broken sanctuary in Irene's cathedral. She had split Irene's lip with the bone of her own brow. She had killed a man on sacred ground while Irene stood between them with open hands. And then she had come to that same cathedral and let Irene hold her, and three days ago she had watched Irene stand in the Hippodrome in a plain white robe and turn forty thousand frightened souls back from the edge with nothing but her words and a column of light that Helena was still not sure what to think of.
She had not asked anyone for help since she was eleven years old. She remembered the day with the unwelcome clarity that only humiliation preserves: the horse, the fall, the cold of the practice yard against her cheek, and her mother's voice above her, flat as a blade. Get up. We do not ask the world to be gentle. We make it gentle, or we do without. When Helena had wept, Theodora had slapped her, once, with the same dispassion she brought to everything, and told her that weakness would only invite exploitation.
The curtain that had replaced the shattered war-room door stirred.
Alexios entered first, as he always did, his gray hair catching the tallow light, his shoulder still bound.
"The Matriarch, Your Highness."
And then Irene was in the room, and Helena forgot, for the space of a breath, the maps and the granaries and the closing fist.
Irene had come without ceremony. No jeweled phelonion, no golden epitrachelion, no train of clergy to remind Helena of her authority. She wore a simple traveling cloak over a robe of undyed wool, and she had walked, Helena realized, through the freezing dark from the cathedral on her own feet.
But that was not what stopped Helena's breath.
Irene's hair, beneath the cloak's hood, was dark. Not the careful dark of a woman who has hidden the silver under a veil. The silver was gone. It fell in thick, lustrous curls the color of burnished mahogany, the way it had fallen when she was the beautiful empress who had captivated the imagination of the entire Empire. The fine lines that nine years of fasting and grief had carved at the corners of her eyes had vanished. Her skin held a warmth that exuded the effortless radiance of a woman in her middle twenties.
Helena had known Irene since they were girls. She had braided that hair in the palace gardens while they whispered secrets they swore to carry to their graves. She had watched the years gather in Irene's face the way they gathered in everyone's. And now the arithmetic had been undone, as though a careful hand had reached into the ledger and erased a decade with a single stroke.
"Irene." Her voice came out rougher than she intended. She had meant to begin with the situation, with the maps, with the cold logic that was the only language she still trusted. Instead she heard herself say, "How?"
Irene lowered the hood. In the tallow light the change was undeniable, almost unbearable to look at, the way it is sometimes unbearable to look at something you were once proud of but are no longer in possession of.
"The Spirit has bestowed it upon me." Irene's voice was steady, gentle, but there was a tremor beneath it, the tremor of a woman still standing inside an event too large to name. "I do not fully understand it myself, Helena. I will not pretend to you that I do."
"That is ... unbelievable …"
"It is the only answer I have." Irene held her gaze without flinching. "You have known me long enough to know when I am performing certainty. I am not performing now."
Helena studied her, the tactical part of her mind reaching for an explanation the way it reached for everything. Paint, it offered first, because the world Helena governed was full of paint. Kohl and white lead and carmine, the whole arsenal of artifice she had watched court women deploy for twenty years. She came around the oak without quite deciding to, lifted the candle, and took Irene's hand in hers, turning it to the light the way a money-changer turns a suspect coin.
There was no paint. There was no trick the candle could find. The hand in hers was warm and smooth and strong, and the calluses were gone, the ones nine years of monastery labor had worn into that palm, the ones Helena had felt at their last meeting and catalogued without meaning to, because she catalogued everything. Disease did not run backward. Exhaustion did not lift the years from a woman's hands. She thought of the column of light in the Hippodrome. She thought of the way Irene had moved when the assassin's arrow came, the lateral sway no untrained body should have managed.
And then, before the wonder, came the thing she would be ashamed of for the rest of the night, hot and quick and entirely human: envy. Helena had spent herself on this empire the way a candle spends itself. She had watched her own image decay in its service, had paid out her youth one council session at a time. And her friend stood before her in her best decades again, returned like a crown that had only been borrowed. For one heartbeat Helena was intense with jealousy. The heartbeat passed and left shame behind it, and the shame passed too, because Helena no longer had room for feelings that could not be put to work.
What did not pass was the thing underneath, rising slowly, the way cold rises through stone.
Either I am witnessing a miracle, she thought, or I have lost the ability to discern a petty trick. And then, watching Irene watch her back with those steady, unaged eyes, she understood that she had not lost it. That was the whole terror of it. She knew exactly which this was.
If the miracle was real, then miracles were real. Not just metaphors priests sang under the dome. Not the empty promises her mother had called them, good for keeping the poor patient. It also implied that the Spirit was not just a distant figurehead that could not care less about mundane matters or was real only in the minds of the people. The Spirit was an entity that watched, and heard, and reached down into the world to remake a woman because it was pleased with her, and it had done so on consecrated ground where Helena had put a sword through a man.
The Spirit hears prayers. The thought arrived with the weight of an enemy column appearing on an undefended flank. Irene prayed in a cold cell for nine years, and something was listening. All those years, something was listening. And behind that realization, quieter and far more terrible: Then it has heard me too. Every order. Every word in the chapel. The cathedral floor.
Helena had not felt fear on this scale since she was seven years old. Something in her bowed, all at once and without her permission, performed entirely on the inside where no one would ever see it. She was looking at a miracle. The events of the past few weeks had completely drained her faith in the Spirit. And with it, any sense of mercy. And yet, now the reminder of the Spirit's mercy stood in her war room in a traveling cloak with snow melting in its impossible hair, and it had come because she asked.
She set Irene's hand down with great care, the way one sets down something that has turned out to be holy.
And the last thing settled into place with the soft finality of a key turning. Trust.
Helena had summoned Irene tonight intending to gamble on Irene's kindness and their shared past. She had been betting on the mercy and goodness of her friend—dear and kind though Irene was, still only human. That was why Helena had not allowed herself to hope for much. After all, humans had proven unreliable and treacherous in her experience, none more so than her very own son.
But if what stood before her was not merely her dear, kind friend Irene, but a messenger blessed by the Spirit, then it changed everything.
For the first time in weeks, Helena felt true relief — so immense that her whole body seemed to loosen beneath it, every locked muscle surrendering at once until she had to steady herself against the sheer weight of its release. And yet beneath the relief, something else stirred: awe, threaded through with fear. Would Irene be here to offer mercy or to pronounce the Spirit's judgement?
"If it comforts you," Irene said softly, reading her the way she had always read her, "I am not accustomed to it either. I still startle at polished bronze. I do not know why it was given. I only know what one does with a gift too large to repay." Her mouth curved, rueful and young. "One rises earlier."
"Thank you for coming," she said. "I did not know whether you would."
"You sent word that you needed help." Irene's expression did not change. "I have prayed for you to say those words since the night you put on the armor. I was not going to make you say them twice."
The kindness of it was almost worse than cruelty would have been. Helena's jaw tightened. She made herself stand straight, made herself meet Irene's eyes, and she said the thing that she was too afraid to confess to.
"I need your help."
There was only the oak, and the maps, and the woman who had braided her hair. "I have steel, and walls, and a fleet, and a treasury. I have done everything my mother taught me to do, and I have done it well, and the city is coming apart in my hands. There are things steel cannot hold. You held forty thousand of them in the Hippodrome with the truth." Her voice steady now. "I cannot do this alone. I am asking you to help me keep order in the city."
The words hung in the tallow smoke.
Irene crossed the room without hurry and came to the far side of the oak. She set her hands flat upon the wood, a quiet mirror of Helena's own, and looked down for a long moment at the closing fist drawn in red ink.
"Then let us hold it," she said. "But a city is not held the way a sword is held, Helena. A shepherd does not grip the flock; she walks ahead of it. If we do this together, the manner of it will have to change."
Part 2
They sat across the oak, the maps between them like a third party to the negotiation.
It struck Helena, even through the fog of exhaustion, that they had not sat together like this in years. Council chambers, yes. Liturgies and audiences and the careful public choreography of a regent and a Matriarch who happened also to have been girls together. But not this: two people at a table in the dead of night, with no audience and no script, deciding the fate of half a million souls between them. The last time had been a different table, in a different palace, in the blood-soaked aftermath of the night the world burned, when the three of them were scarcely more than children and Theodora's mercenaries were still mounting heads on pikes along the central avenue. They had sat together then, she and Irene and Alexander, three children who had just been saved by a horror, and they had made a vow.
We will be different. We will build a world where this is never necessary again.
Helena had spent the last days making that vow into a lie, one decision at a time.
"My condition is simple," Irene said. "No more purges."
"Irene."
"Hear me. No more purges. No more storming of sacred ground. No more men dragged from the Spirit's house and killed before His altar to make the rest go quiet. The killing stops." Irene's voice was gentle and entirely without softness, the way deep water is gentle. "Mercy becomes your policy, Helena. Not a weakness you permit yourself when you can afford it. A policy. Visible. Public. Costly to you. The thing the city sees when it looks at the palace."
Helena had expected this, and she had her answer ready, because she had been having this argument in her own head for days.
"Mercy that gets us both killed helps no one." She tapped the red ink with one finger, the Thracian theme, the Opsikion, the swelling banner at Adrianoklus. "You want me to be gentle with men who have planted assassins in your cathedral and turned my own son against me. I tried gentleness. I placed my faith in reason and patience and the belief that people could be guided. Do you know what my reward was? My child, with a knife three inches from my heart, because a man I had welcomed into my household whispered into his ear that I was the threat. Had he succeeded, Irene, this city would already be burning. Hundreds of thousands would die in the ensuing chaos and bloodbath. You are asking me to wager all of them on the hope that wickedness can be reasoned with."
"I am not." Irene leaned forward, and the tallow light moved across her impossible young face. "I am not asking you to be gentle with the men who did this. I helped you separate them, do you remember? We sat over the lists together, the guilty marked and the innocent shielded. I have never once told you to spare the architects of this. Let them face your justice. Let them face the law, in the light, before the people, where justice means something. That is not mercy abandoned. That is mercy that has learned to aim."
She straightened.
"What I am telling you is that you have confused two different things, and the confusion is unravelling your control. There is justice, which is the punishment of the guilty. And there is the sword, which is the spreading of fear so that the guilty and the innocent alike fall silent. Empress Theodora could not tell them apart. She believed that order was the child of ruthlessness, and so she taught you to reach for terror when what the moment needed."
The motto rose in Helena unbidden, the private creed of the House of Leonikos, the words Theodora had carved into both her children before they were old enough to refuse them. Prosperity is the fruit of suffering, and order the child of ruthlessness. Those who rule with mercy invite the blade. Those who rule with love die upon it.
"And what does the moment need," Helena said, very quietly, "if not the sword?"
Irene was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice had changed, and Helena recognized the change, because she had heard it three days ago across the bowl of the Hippodrome, the clarion tone of a woman speaking a truth she had been given rather than one she had chosen.
"You said it yourself, Helena. In your own heart. I know you did, because I have watched you arrive at it the way I watched you arrive at everything, ten steps ahead of the rest of us and hating where the road led." Irene held her eyes. "You are wielding a sword in a city that needs a shepherd."
The breath went out of Helena as though she had been struck.
The thought had come to her in the imperial box, watching Irene command forty thousand souls with nothing but a robe and the truth. It had returned to her at this very table, scant hours ago, with the weight of a verdict. I am a woman with a sword in a city that needs a shepherd. She had never spoken it aloud. She had carried it the way she carried everything that frightened her, in silence, behind the steel. And now Irene had set it on the table between them as if she had been there inside Helena's skull, watching the thought form.
"I cannot become a shepherd," Helena said. "I do not know how. My mother saw to that."
"No. You cannot." Irene's voice gentled. "But I can. That is what I am offering you. I will be the shepherd. I will go among the people, day and night, and lend a face to the bread you have already given them and the bread you are going to give them. I will stand between the city and its fear the way I stood in the Hippodrome and offer them certainty. I will dispel the false rumors in every district until the truth does more damage to Phokas than your fleet ever could." She paused, and the next words came slowly, each one set down with care.
"But you must let me, Helena. You cannot use me as a tool and then reach past me for the sword the moment you are frightened. You cannot have my authority and your mother's methods both. The people will smell the contradiction within a week, and then I will be only another of the Regent's deceptions, and you will have spent the one weapon your enemies cannot match. You must let me be what I am, fully, even when every instinct in you screams to do otherwise. Especially then."
Helena looked down at the maps. At the city ringed in red. At the granaries and the garrisons and the merciless arithmetic that had been her only companion for countless hours.
She thought of her father. Bookish, gentle Leo, who had built orphanages for the children of dead soldiers and been mocked by his own wife for his softness, and whose words had returned to Helena in the Hippodrome as she watched Irene work. People need certainty in times of uncertainty. A good leader must be able to give it to them. He had been right, and Theodora had been right too. The tragedy of Helena's whole life was that she had been raised by both of them and forced to choose, Leo's idealism in one ear and Theodora's pragmatism in the other, and she had merely mixed the two in uneven measures and succeeded in neither.
Justice tempered by wisdom. The guilty punished in the light. The frightened fed and shielded and given a reason to believe. The sword set down, not because the city was safe, but because a sword could not win the only war that mattered.
It was not her mother's playbook. It was not anything in the playbook at all.
"All right," she said. The word cost her more than the seizure of the treasury had cost her, more than the storming of the cathedral. "No more purges. Justice in the light, for the guilty, before the people. And you are the shepherd." She lifted her eyes. "I will let you. I do not know if I can keep that promise when the walls are shaking and my hands are screaming for the blade. But I will try, and I hope that is worth something."
Something moved in Irene's face, something Helena had not seen there in nine years, and had not expected to see again. It was relief, but it was more than relief. It was the look of a woman who had wagered everything she had on the belief that her friend was still reachable beneath the steel, and had just been told she had wagered correctly.
"It is worth a great deal," Irene said.
For a moment they simply sat, two women at a table, and the war drew no closer for the space of that moment, and Helena let herself feel, very briefly, the thing she had not let herself feel in days: that she was not, after all, entirely isolated.
Then Irene's expression shifted, and the second understanding arrived, quieter than the first, and stranger.
"There is something else I must tell you," Irene said. "And I tell it to you carefully, because I do not fully understand it, and because you are a practical woman and what I am about to say is not a practical thing." She drew a breath. "An archangel of the Spirit has warned me that there is a darkness gathering over the empire. Larger than this rebellion. Larger than Phokas and his banner and the themes that have turned against you. The voice said it would consume far more than one city's politics or one regent's purge if it is left unchecked."
Helena's eyes narrowed, but not in disbelief. She had stopped disbelieving things three days ago, in the Hippodrome.
"This is the same entity that took the years from your face."
"It is."
"And it did not tell you what this darkness is."
"No." Irene's jaw set. "Only that it is coming, and that what lies ahead will be very demanding. Physically. Spiritually. The voice said the tasks would require strength and stamina and endurance that..." She glanced down at her own smooth, unlined hands, and a flicker of something passed over her, half wonder and half dread. "That my body, in its earlier state, could not have provided."
Helena absorbed this in silence, one claim at a time. She thought of the impossible hair, the lifted years. A practical measure, then, for a practical purpose. So even the Spirit's most faithful servant did not receive blessings without purpose; the gift had been issued, the way a quartermaster issues a blade, against work yet to be done. Then fairness might be a hard rule. And rules, Helena knew, ran both ways.
Then what chance do I have of earning forgiveness?
The thought surfaced before she could stop it, barbed and familiar. She forced it down with ruthless efficiency; now was not the time for doubts. The Spirit had offered her a chance. That alone was more than she had dared to hope for.
Part 3
Two hundred and thirty miles to the north of the Gillyrian capital, the war kept a colder camp.
Winter owned Podem after dark. Frost furred the merlons, the braziers along the wall walk burned with the stingy blue of rationed charcoal, and the Maritsa ran black and slow beneath its skin of ice. Behind the southeast rampart, in the lee of the old corner tower, Saralta passed a leather skin hanging from a spear rack and struck it with the flat of her fist as she walked by.
Thock.
The militia boy on watch came off the wall with his spear half-leveled before his boots hit the ground.
"We are not under attack," Saralta said, without breaking stride. "I strike it so it stays lively. Milk that is not punched grows lazy and sours in the wrong way." She considered the boy's expression, which suggested a man reassessing every report he had ever heard about steppe princesses. "The wrong sour kills you. The right sour keeps you warm through a winter like this one. My people have buried very few men who drank properly."
"Yes, Princess," the boy said, in the tone of someone agreeing with weather.
James and Bisera came out of the dark together, down from the wall walk, rime on the fur of Bisera's cloak and the cold pinched white into her cheeks. James carried two wooden boards under his arm, a charcoal stick tucked behind one ear, the night's tallies from the aid station still drying on the topmost board. The watch detail straightened the way soldiers straighten for her, not from fear, from something better than fear.
"You are in time," Saralta announced, unhooking the skin. "It fought back when I struck it, which means it is ready."
"Tallies first." James set the boards down. "Eleven in the warming hall, two fevers down since yesterday, no new frostbite on the wall companies since we changed the glove rotation. Serko's quartermaster says I count things the way other men drink."
"You do."
"It's cheaper."
Saralta filled the communal bowl and held it out to Bisera first, eldest in rank served first, one of a thousand small laws her mother had carried out of a life she never named, and that Saralta alone knew had been lived behind silk walls an empire away.
Bisera took the bowl and drank. She did not hesitate, because thirty men on the wall could see her, and the Lioness of Vakeria did not flinch at a friendly cup. The koumiss went down sour and alive, faintly fizzing on the tongue, with a smokiness that was the hide of the skin itself and a kick at the finish like a small contemptuous horse. She lowered it with perfect composure. Her eyes were watering.
"It is," she said, "vigorous."
"A trader once told my father it makes the inner man joyful," Saralta said gravely, taking the bowl back to refill it.
"The inner man is certainly awake."
The bowl came around to James, and his mind performed its old reflexive audit: shared vessel, no boiling, unknown ferment. Then the rest of his mind, the part that had been living in this century long enough to be honest, supplied the correction. Koumiss. Fermented. The acid kills half of what raw milk would carry. It's safer than the well water was before we built the boiling stations. He politely refused to drink it. He feared his modern immune system might not be ready for the challenge.
Then Saralta, reaching to pour again, actually looked at the two of them.
The brazier light was not kind. Beneath Bisera's eyes sat two bruised half-moons the color of thumb-smudged charcoal. Beneath James's sat their twins. A couple, upright by force of habit, wearing the same shadows like a matched set of decorations.
Saralta's gaze traveled from one face to the other with the slow relish of a scout reading tracks beside a waterhole.
"And how," she asked pleasantly, "was last night?"
"Wonderful," they said. Both of them. At the same instant.
The silence that followed had texture.
Pink climbed Bisera's cheeks, and this time the koumiss could not be blamed for it. She became urgently interested in the tally boards. James scratched the top of his head with the charcoal stick, realized what he was doing, and stopped.
Saralta's grin arrived like cavalry.
She leaned in between their shoulders and dropped her voice to a whisper built for exactly three people. "Did you finally consummate your love?"
"Saralta!" It came out of Bisera as a strangled whisper-shout, scandal in full armor, red flooding her face to the ears and past them.
The watch detail developed a sudden collective fascination with the horizon. Somebody's shoulders were shaking.
"I joke, I joke." Saralta raised both hands, palms out, entirely unrepentant. "But be fair to me, General. Two people awake from dusk to dawn. Both call it wonderful. Neither can look at me. I am a simple daughter of the steppes; I know of very few pursuits that keep a man and a woman up an entire night and are still praised in the morning." She paused, and hope entered her voice, bright and marginally too loud. "Unless the two of you spent the night devising some brilliant counterattack to lift this siege. In which case I withdraw everything, and offer my deepest apology."
"There is no counterattack." Bisera turned the bowl in her hands. The blush stayed, but something soft moved in behind it that had nothing to do with embarrassment. "James was telling me the history of his world." She said it the way she set down anything too precious to carry into a watch night: carefully, and not quite looking at either of them. "He began with an empire called Rome, whose history sounds like Gillyria wearing another name. When the sky greyed, we had only just buried it." A small, wondering shake of her head. "A thousand years, and he says that was merely the introduction."
Something changed in Saralta's face.
The mischief drained out of it, and what came in behind was hungrier: the look she had from the nights she sat over the anatomy book, tracing its illustrations by the last of the firelight. She set the skin down with exaggerated care, crossed the distance in two strides, and captured James's free hand in both of hers.
"Great Mage." Her dark eyes had gone wide and starlit, fixed on him with the shameless intensity of a falcon sighting supper. "Would you bestow upon me the same honour?"
"It's a really long story," James said. "And the introduction alone took one night."
"I will pay." The words came fast, a horse trader smelling weakness. "I have gold. I have gems. I will teach you to drink properly, which will greatly boost your image among the troops." She turned the full force of the starlight on Bisera. "You cannot hoard an entire world, General. Hoarding knowledge is worse than hoarding grain."
"He needs sleep, Saralta."
"He can sleep between empires."
James laughed despite himself, or possibly because of the koumiss. "Tomorrow night," he said. "One empire per night for the next five nights for now. And I want it recorded that I am being bribed to teach history."
"Recorded." Saralta released his hand with the satisfaction of a khan concluding a treaty, reclaimed the skin, and struck it once more for luck. "I will bring the gold and gems so that you could give them to your betrothed here to grant me permission to join you two at night."
James and Bisera both blushed but soon realized no mischief was intended by Saralta.
The runner came up the inner stair two steps at a time, and the atmosphere got serious.
"General." The man's breath smoked. "South road. A convoy's come into the Gillyrian camp under double escort. Heavy wagons, twenty at the least, barrels under oiled canvas. They're parking them behind the second ditch, away from the cook fires." He swallowed. "Well away from the fires, General."
Bisera set the bowl down, and the woman who had blushed to her hairline a breath ago was gone as if she had never stood there; what remained was carved from colder material. Barrels kept far from flame meant one thing in Alexander's inventory, and she had learned that lesson from her painful battlefield experiences.
"Gillyrian Fire," she said. "The Gillyrians had resupplied their Gillyrian Fire stockpile." Her eyes went, as they had gone a dozen times these past nights without her quite knowing why, to the southeast stretch of wall above them, to the old corner tower whose footing frost sweated strangely at dawn. Something about that ground had been speaking to her for days in a language just below hearing.
"Double the dawn watch on this stretch. Wet hides on every hoarding by midmorning, sand and vinegar barrels at fifty-pace intervals along the walk, water details for the hides told off by lot from the militia rolls."
"Sixty sand barrels by the morning bell," James said, already writing. "I'll pull the masons' apprentices. The mortar's frozen anyway; they're idle and they're strong."
"My riders can be on the riverbank at first light," Saralta said. "If the convoy's drivers water their teams outside the ditch line, I can make barrels very expensive."
"No raid." Bisera's voice left no seam to argue into. "The ground between here and their ditch is a killing field with snow on it, and Alexander has wanted you to offer him your riders on open ground since the day he gave you back. You will have the riverbank patrol, eyes only, and you will be back inside the gate before their trumpets sound morning." A beat. "That is an order I am asking you to keep, Saralta."
Saralta held her gaze a moment, the old hot instinct and the newer, harder-won discipline negotiating behind her dark eyes. Then she pressed her fist to her chest, steppe fashion. "Eyes only. On my father's name."
Above them the watch changed, iron-shod boots ringing on frozen stone, and the brazier spat blue. South of the walls, far beneath the reach of any sentry's torch, Gillyrian soldiers worked patiently, tunneling toward the city in silence while lamps burned low behind wooden shutters.