The King's Blood

Dawson as he passed.
    Dawson leaned in toward Rabbr Bannien, eldest son of Lord Bannien of Estinford and now garrison commander, meeting the boy’s expression with something between despair and rage.
    “Tell me this is a joke,” Dawson said.
    “I thought the same when they arrived, Lord Marshal,” the young Bannien said. “But now I’ve been watching them for a time… I’m not sure anymore.”
    Dawson turned back to consider the garrison force. He hadn’t left a full company at the bridge. There was no point, when a few dozen could defend the keep and a few hundred couldn’t win across to the other side. They looked sharp, smart, and well rested. Unlike his own men. An uneasy thought stirred in his mind.
    “Are they cunning men?”
    “I don’t think so, my lord. Not like any I’ve ever seen. They don’t… they don’t do anything exactly. It’s just… You’d have to see it, sir.”
    “Right, then,” Dawson said. He strode to the tallest of the three priests, nodding at him rather than saluting. “Show me why I should trust my men to your plan.”
    Half an hour later, the priest walked out onto the wide span of the bridge alone with only a caller’s horn. The span of the bridge and the rushing water below and the blood-and-stone of the round keep made the priest look like a painter’s image of faith: a sparrow overwhelmed but unbending. Dawson stood at the white keep’s open gate, watching with his arms crossed and tired to the bone from the march and the long, muddy slog of a war before that. Contempt swam at the back of his throat, tasting of bile.
    The priest lifted the horn to his mouth and began to shout over the rush of the water below him.
    “You have already lost! No force can stand against the army of Antea! You have no power here! You have already lost ! Everything you fight for is gone already. Everything you hope for is lost. You cannot win.”
    Dawson glanced over at the boy. Young Bannien looked out across the bridge, rapt. His eyes were on the priest, and the ghost of a smile played about the boy’s lips. Dawson felt laughter boiling up in his own throat; it felt like horror.
    “This?” Dawson said. “This is how we take the far shore? We nag them out of it?”
    “I know,” the garrison commander said. “I had the same reaction at first. But they do this every day and into the night. And the more they do this the more it seems like… it might be true.”
    Dawson said something obscene.
    “Get that idiot off the bridge before someone puts an arrow in him and bring him to me,” Dawson said. “We’re ending this before we waste any more time.”
    “Yes, Lord Marshal,” the boy said, looking abashed. Dawson stalked off through the courtyard and up a flight of stone stairs. The commander’s private rooms were close, dark, and poorly lit. The choice was between light and air, but Dawson would by God see the face of the men he was speaking to. Meantime, he sat in the dim and he seethed.
    Palliako’s cultists came together, all three. They bowed at the door and sat on the cushions at Dawson’s feet. They looked up at him with a profound calm, their dark eyes glittering in the candlelight. The garrison commander took his place behind Dawson, standing.
    “Tell me the rest of the plan,” Dawson said. “Once you’ve finished your little theater piece, then what?”
    The priests looked at one another. They seemed uncomfortable, so that at least was good. They had enough brains between them to notice when they were being dressed down. Dawson sat forward in the camp chair, wood and leather creaking under him.
    “When they have understood, you will take what is yours from them,” the middle one said. He had a rounder face than the others, with thin nostrils and lips. He had an accent that reminded Dawson of reading ancient poems as a boy. The cadences of the words seemed like they’d been dug out of a ruin. Or a barrow. “There need be nothing more.”
    Dawson ran the tip of his tongue across the inside of his teeth and nodded. It was a gesture he’d picked up as a boy by watching his father when the man was enraged to the edge of violence.
    “The hell we will,” he said. “I don’t care if you talk until your tongues cramp. We don’t have the men or the position to take that bridge, and I won’t see a single Antean life lost by this folly.”
    “The goddess is with you. You will not fail,” the round-faced priest said.
    “Enough! Garrison commander Bannien,