The Burning White (13 page)

“No, I’m serious. I’m not being a jackass.” He shrugged. “This time.”

Big Leo said, “We win once we kill the White King and all his leadership. That’s winning. Nothing short of that.”

Ben-hadad took off his flip-down spectacles. “What if, by that definition, we can’t win?”

“You think we can’t win?” Ferkudi asked.

“Worse,” Ben-hadad said. “Breaker doesn’t.”

They all looked at Kip. “I never said that,” he said.

But they all knew him.

“Focus on the problem,” Cruxer said. “We have to lift the siege on Green Haven or we’ll lose the satrapy. If we lose the capital, we lose Blood Forest. We do that and the other satrapies fall eventually. Maybe we can’t beat him alone, but we’re not alone. Winning is stopping him here, showing he can be defeated and trusting the rest of the empire to do their part, too, albeit later than we’d like.”

“No, we have to do more than that,” Ben-hadad said. “The White King has multiple paths to victory. Big Leo was right. We have to kill him. Even if he loses here, he can go on and win elsewhere, drawing strength from everything he’s already conquered, and then come back. With the land he holds and the revenues he commands, the longer this war goes on, the more certain our defeat.”

Cruxer said, “To lift the siege, we either have to leave right away or we’ll get besieged ourselves here. Even if the bandits can’t keep us under siege for more than a few weeks, that’ll be long enough for Green Haven to fall. But if we leave, we leave Dúnbheo defenseless.”

“I kind of like the idea of those old bastards on the Council of Divines being led away in chains. They deserve it for all their lies,” Winsen said.

“But everyone else here doesn’t,” Cruxer said.

“Dúnbheo was under siege,” Ben-hadad said. “Of course they lied to us. What were they gonna do? Tell us they’re not worth saving? Admit they didn’t have any food or supplies to share? They’re corrupt idiots, but not stupid idiots.”

Cruxer said, “Dúnbheo has ceremonial and symbolic power. History. The whole satrapy is taking heart as they get news of our victory over the next days and weeks. The Divines might have convinced themselves the city still has strategic value as well.”

“Aw, Cruxer, always trying to see the best in everyone except yourself,” Winsen said. “It’s cute.”

“Shut up, Win,” Big Leo rumbled.

“The thing is,” Kip said, feeling like he was groping around the foot of a really big idea, “Koios knew it didn’t. If he’d already seized Loch Lána and had a plan in motion to strangle the Great River, why try to take Dúnbheo?”

“The symbolic value,” Ben-hadad said. “This city is still Blood Forest’s pagan heart—and there’s still that huge throne in that audience chamber. A throne unpolished by a king’s waxing moons in four centuries. If the White King sits there, he becomes a king in truth—the first king since Lucidonius.”

“But if that was it,” Kip said, “why wouldn’t he have come here himself, to make sure the city fell?”

“A general has to delegate,” Ben-hadad said. “If you see a general fighting on the front lines, you’re seeing a damned foo—” He cut off as he realized something. He looked at Kip and cringed. “Uh, I mean, usually, you’re seeing a man choosing glory over victory.”

“Breaker fights on the front lines,” Ferkudi said.

“Thanks, guys,” Kip said.

“I did say ‘usually,’ ” Ben-hadad grumbled.

Kip had moved fast, trying to cut the White King’s lines of supply and reinforcement while getting supplies and reinforcements of his own—the word of Kip’s victory saving Dúnbheo should have given the Spectrum a good reason to bet fully on him. Instead, the White King had beaten him to the exact same strategy.

Kip had been doing everything right to make allies. At great cost, he’d done all he could to make friends, and here he was, alone and unsupported.

Again.

No, no, that wasn’t true. He
and his people
were alone and unsupported. He wasn’t poor Kip Delauria of Rekton anymore. He was Kip Guile of Blood Forest. And if the fights felt the same—the isolation, the self-doubt—maybe all those earlier fights had been readying him for this one.

“Maybe there are other forces Koios is worried about threatening his siege,” Ben-hadad said. “The pygmies, maybe? Or maybe the Chromeria’s finally decided to stop sitting on its thumbs and is attacking from Atash? Or maybe he’s so certain of victory, he’s in no rush.”

“He’s attacked aggressively everywhere else, from Garriston to Idoss to Ru to Ox Ford,” Kip said. “Now he changes?”

“If we leave Dúnbheo, he can paint us as abandoning them to die. If we don’t leave, he can paint us as cowards abandoning Green Haven to die. That’s worth a few weeks for him, isn’t it?” Ben-hadad said.

Big Leo said, “Does it give us enough time to call back the Night Mares?”

I should’ve kept the Night Mares with me, scouting. If I had, this never would have happened.

Moving fast doesn’t help if you move exactly the wrong direction. Dim people ride a mule to their conclusions; bright ones ride a racehorse. But not always in the right direction.

“No,” Kip said. “They’re our fastest troops. That’s why I sent them. Before any messengers could catch up with them, they’d have split in a hundred directions anyway, trying to rally the villages.”

“So have we already lost?” Ben-hadad asked. He was skipping ahead of the rest of them to the final judgment. That was just how fast his mind worked. Ben might well become a great general in time, but his true genius lay with the
machinae
he could imagine, and then actually make, and then perfect. Few people could do even one of those things.

Of them all, Ben-hadad was the one who should change history—and would, if Kip didn’t get him killed first.

Kip pulled back his sleeve where the Turtle-Bear tattoo was vibrant with all the colors he’d recently drafted. “ Turtle-bears can do many things, but one thing they’re shit at: they don’t know how to give up.”

“Are you telling me you have a plan?” Cruxer asked.

“Does this have something to do with why you went to the window yesterday?” Ben-hadad asked.

The crowd today, as Tisis had predicted, was easily twice as large.

The seals on the door cracked open, but there was the appropriate knock, so no one was alarmed. Tisis came in. Kip was glad to see her. “News?” he asked.

She nodded. “I have an update on our . . . cicatriferous friend.”

Private nicknames were useful when you were worried about being overheard, so they’d privately coined that for Daragh the Coward, who was famous for his many scars.

“Good news, I hope?” Kip asked.

“No,” she said. She looked ill. “But there’s something else first.”

She blew out a breath as she looked around at the Mighty. She tossed her petasos onto the table. “I’m in charge of the scouts. This map is mine. Kip invented it, but all the intel on it is work I cleared. It’s all from interviews I conducted, reports I checked. I’m responsible for what’s on it and for what’s not. I denote reports I don’t trust or have questions about. Anything that’s wrong on here is my fault. And I loused up, badly. I still have no idea how Koios took the river without me hearing about it. There are rumors now about river monsters, which I assume and really hope are river wights—I don’t know, and I still can’t confirm them. Regardless, it’s an enormous failure. I’ve got people checking
everything
, but it may be weeks before we know what went wrong. There should have been some refugee, some report. Maybe there was. Maybe I filtered it out. I must have. I’ve got ideas about what happened, but I’m not even going to offer guesses right now. Not after this.”

Tucking an errant strand of blonde hair behind an ear, she looked at everyone in turn around the table, except Kip. “I failed you, and I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

There was only silence. No one protested that she hadn’t bungled things badly.

She looked over at Winsen. “If you give me shit, Win—”

“I won’t,” he said.

“. . . I’ll deserve it,” she said, finishing over his words.

He looked at her one moment more. Then he shrugged. “I won’t.”

Dammit, Winsen, don’t you go surprising me with a glimmer of humanity.

Finally she looked at Kip, “My lord. I failed you most of all. I’d like to offer my—”

“Denied. Give us your report,” he said.

She didn’t want anything soft from him, not after such a failure, not in front of these men, whose acceptance she craved so much.

They accepted her as one of the Mighty, but she was different. It wasn’t or wasn’t only that she was a woman; Teia had obviously belonged with them, different as her own abilities were from theirs. But Tisis feared they only tolerated
her
for Kip’s sake. She feared they thought her weak because she was no warrior.

The worst thing Kip could do in this moment was coddle her. It would alienate her from them forever.

She took a deep breath. “With the Blood Robe deserters and the refugees and escaped slaves from the war, I’ve been tracking upward of fifty bandit groups, but I concentrated on Iphitos the Archer, Bardan the Grave Digger, Colm the Cannibal, with Daragh the Coward having a smaller band, but claiming territory we’ve traversed. I tried to get agents in with these various bandits, but each band requires anyone who joins to do one terrible thing or another as initiation to weed out such infiltrators. Do you know how many
good guys
are willing to murder innocent people in order to infiltrate a gang of bad guys?”

“None, I’m sure,” Cruxer said.

Kip could think of one: Teia.

He didn’t say it, of course. Not to his wife.

“Anyway, so I couldn’t get good sources, but now that Daragh the Coward’s army is within two days’ march, I’m working on getting figures of the composition of his forces now.”

They all chewed on that.

“He’s a bandit, not a soldier. You think we can buy him off?” Ben-hadad said.

“With what money?” Ferkudi asked.

“You were saying, earlier? About a plan?” Cruxer prompted Kip.

There were few options, and none of them good. No use bemoaning it. Kip said, “Pull the last remaining Night Mares we have from messenger duty. Send them to surround Daragh the Coward’s camp tonight and tomorrow. Tell them to let themselves be seen, though. Then move stealthily to another side of their camp and be seen again. They’re to do all they can to appear to be a much larger force.” Kip looked around the room, seeing sudden hope in some of their faces. He trusted these men with his life. He trusted them even with his fallibilities. “Truth is, calling it a plan would be generous. And it relies way too much on an open question.”

“What’s that?” Ferkudi asked.

“What’s an ‘open question’?” Winsen asked him. “ ‘Well, you see, son, when a mommy question and a daddy question love each other very much—’ ”

In unison, Big Leo, Ben-hadad, and Cruxer said, “Shut up, Win.”

“What’s the question?” Cruxer asked, trying to get them back on track, as ever.

Kip said, “How much am I really Gavin Guile’s son?”

Aliviana had stood in place for two thousand seven hundred seconds, hands folded in front of her, chin high. In their hundreds, the petitioners had vacated the hall. Gods don’t inconvenience themselves for mortals.

But apparently, they do inconvenience one another. Her patience had worn thin after the first six hundred and twenty seconds. It was such a transparent power play to make her wait while he took his time that her estimation of the White King fell by the minute.

Then she realized he wasn’t merely waiting to see if he could goad her into some outburst; he was taking counsel. He sat silent on his throne with the air of one listening to attendants. Very interesting. She would have to speak with Beliol about that later.

“Your old love is in Dúnbheo,” the White King said finally.

“He humiliated the forces you sent to take the city, you mean.” Of course she’d told Koios about Kip, a long time ago. Including that the love had been one way, and the other way. None of which mattered now. What mattered was letting Koios know she had her own means of knowing things.

But he didn’t look surprised she knew. “I’d have preferred to crush young Guile, but entangling him will serve almost as well. If my generals fail in the task I leave them, I can return when my reign is secure with ten times the forces and all the gods. His time is almost finished.”

He was studying her as if this were a test. “Do you think I
care
?” she asked.

“Don’t you?” he asked.

She thought about it, really thought about it. “I . . . liked Kip,” she said finally. “Really liked him, actually. Not in the puppy-panting-after-my-heels way that he liked me, naturally. But he was a good kid. Too damaged, though. Too self-loathing for one to ever really take him seriously. Who needs all that? But I . . . admired that he was loyal. He tried to do what was right, no matter the cost. I see now that that was a weakness. He took loyalty to illogical extremes. You can’t help others when you’re dead yourself. It’s a miracle he’s not dead already, come to think of it. Kip . . . Kip has always been doomed, hasn’t he? I shall miss him, but mortals die. It is our burden to watch their lights bloom in the darkness and then fade back into it after a few short years, isn’t it? I shall mourn his passing—no, no, that’s not exactly true, and will be less true as time goes on. I shall note his death when I learn of it, perhaps even regretfully, so whether I do that now or in some years, what’s the difference?”

“Here I thought you came to threaten me,” the White King said.

“Threaten?” she asked, surprised.

“You’ve refused to bend the knee to me. Your message spoke of a partnership instead, so surely you have some ‘or else,’ ” Koios said. He sat down now on his ivory throne as if she were merely another petitioner come to beg some favor of him. It was a power display, to sit when the other must stand. He even pretended nonchalance, but his muscles, though bent into a slouch, were taut for action.

She noticed such things. She had quite the eye for detail now.

“Oh, I see,” she said. “That helps immensely. You’re taking me being enslaved to you as the default, so my defiance of that order irks you, and you assume I must have some force backing me up, some power that allows me to insult you to your face by not groveling. That is quite illuminating. Instead, the true default is that we each reign over separate realms, and we can either join together—if such is mutually profitable—or we can go to war, which most certainly would not be. Comprehending easily this truth, which seems to have eluded you, I spoke of partnership.”