Book II. Chapter 134. Broken People

The cart shook and rattled, threatening to pitch its cargo into the air whenever it hit a bump, dropped into a rain-cut rut, or jolted over fallen branches and wind-scattered deadwood. The Yellow mages looked close to panic as the equipment crates jerked from side to side, trying to work free of the leather straps and thick ropes that creaked under the strain and tethered them to rings riveted into the floor.

“Are you certain you’ve checked everything, Tikhonov?” Senior Magister Varvara Ostrozhskaya asked in her usual haughty, mocking tone.

The Senior Magister was so short and slight that she looked somewhat comical astride her powerful horse, whose proud carriage made it stand out even among the expedition’s other mounts.

“Of course, Miss—”

“Senior Magister!” Ostrozhskaya cut Tikhonov off sharply. It was a peculiar cry, almost a battle cry, somehow blending a shrill screech with something hard, almost steely. “I have a title, Tikhonov, and you will kindly use it when you address me!”

“Y-yes, of course. Forgive me, Senior Magister.”

“And now you’re leaving off my surname as well?!”

“Forgive me, Senior Magister Ostrozhskaya, I—”

“You!” Varvara cut Tikhonov off again. “The only dependable thing about you, Tikhonov, is your impenetrable stupidity!”

Ardi even felt a little sorry for Tikhonov, who was mild-mannered and soft around the middle. Tikhonov was past his youth; he dropped his gaze, embarrassed, and glanced around as if hoping someone would come to his defense. Unfortunately, during their time together, everyone had already gotten used to Miss Ostrozhskaya’s strange temperament.

That was why, wherever the two scholars appeared, everyone else always gave them a wide berth. Now, as the Yellow mages traveled the Park’s only road (if that enormously broad swath of cleared forest could be called a road), they found themselves nearly alone. Four humming, clattering mechanical carts loaded with equipment were their only company; their drivers plainly would have preferred to join the Hunters, who had ridden off to a respectful distance.

Ardi glanced up at the sky, then checked his watch. It had been just over a day and a half since they’d left First Station. They’d left the porters there with the coaches and Yellik’s herd of horses. The porters would wait for anyone who needed an escort on the journey back.

The Hunters’ Guild had outfitted the expedition with new gear, transport included: both the hoofed variety and the kind now chugging along on massive tracks. At first, Ard hadn’t understood the point of traveling this way. Now his new four-legged partner, a somewhat lazy dark brown horse, squelched through the sticky earth, and Ard understood: not a single wheeled truck could have made it through here.

The Guild had supplied the drivers of the tracked carts as well. You could hardly have hired such drivers in town; inside the cabs there was no steering wheel and no simple pair of pedals, only several levers, a multitude of toggle switches and gauges, and four pedals.

For a while, Ardi was curious about exactly how these hulking machines were controlled. He rode closer to chat with the drivers and learn how the machines worked, but the rattling exhaust pipe immediately blasted him with acrid smoke, and he hurried back to his position.

He rode a little apart from Miss Shpritz and Senior Magister Nalensky. The two of them rocked in their saddles, like everyone else in the expedition. Squat pack mules followed obediently behind, now and then snorting their displeasure. They stood only about 1.1 meters high at the withers, yet weighed perhaps four hundred kilos apiece and carried enormous bales on their backs.

All told, the expedition stretched a good half kilometer and now had far more mounts than people.

“Chaz, dear.” Miss Shpritz had a singular talent for pretending nothing had happened. “Is it really all right that we’re making such a racket that they can probably hear us all the way in Metropolis?”

Nalensky was every bit a match for Miss Shpritz. Or else he was remarkably naive. Perhaps he thought that after what he’d written the other day, mistaking Taisia for a prostitute, he’d somehow gotten away with it. Because his efforts to win Miss Shpritz’s favor hadn’t slackened in the least. If anything, the opposite. “Chaz, dear” positively brimmed with confidence in his virility and charm.

“My dear Taisia, that is precisely one of our precautions,” the Senior Magister held forth, his perfume leaving a wake behind him as broad as his ego. “Many of the Anomalies that inhabit the Park are far from harmless, not only to one another but also to us peace-loving researchers.”

Several Hunters passing through the Park some distance away overheard the exchange and snorted contemptuously, sounding remarkably like mules.

“The clearing we’re riding through is called the Avenue, by the way...” Nalensky continued as though he hadn’t heard a thing. Or perhaps he truly hadn’t noticed. Or didn’t want to notice, which came to much the same thing. “You know, like in the city!”

Nalensky gave a chuckle for no discernible reason, which served as a sort of cue for Taisia to produce her own professional peal of laughter, indistinguishable from the real thing. Ardi smirked. That made Miss Shpritz, riding to his right, flinch slightly and tighten her grip on the reins.

Perhaps Taisia had overestimated her stamina. Gradually, Mr. Nalensky was starting to get under her skin, his endless chatter grating on her nerves. And Ardi, whatever that said about him, couldn’t help noticing that he took a certain, almost perverse pleasure in seeing Taisia in the same situation he faced whenever he was in her company.

“See the wire strung from one marker post to the next?” The Senior Magister gestured toward the ordinary iron wire with an open palm. Twisted from several strands, it was barely visible in the midday sun.

The wire did indeed stretch along the Avenue (the broad, dusty clearing that split the southern part of the Park in two), wrapping around the tops of concrete posts sunk into the soil.

“Ley-voltage is applied to it.” Mr. Nalensky deliberately lowered his voice and drew the words out with an air of mystery.

As if “Ley-voltage” were something fantastically magical and out of the ordinary for the average citizen of the Empire. Something that should make any man drop to his knees before the grandeur and depth of the Senior Magister’s knowledge. And any woman, Miss Shpritz in particular, finally give him a better view of the décolletage Nalensky’s wandering eyes had been trying to glimpse for days.

It wasn’t that Senior Magister Nalensky was a bad man. He was just...

Ardi didn’t know how best to describe a mage who was vain, far too loud, but harmless.

“Well, imagine that.” Miss Shpritz opened her eyes wide. “Ley-voltage... how amazing.”

It even sounded to Ardi as though Taisia had put a hint of sarcasm into her voice for once, but apparently he was alone in that impression, because Mr. Nalensky kept right on holding forth with as much zeal as before, if not more.

“Don’t worry, sweet Taisia.” He waved his hand so vigorously that his horse shook its mane. “As you can see, the wire is several meters above the ground. So no one will be harmed by accidental contact. Pure Ley-voltage is very dangerous to living organisms! You may not know this, but if you touch a bare Ley-cable in your apartment, you could literally burn up!”

“What a nightmare!” Taisia exclaimed. “Thank you, dear Chaz... oh, what would I do without you? You’re so smart!”

Ard got the feeling that even his horse had whinnied for reasons entirely unrelated to the gnat that had bitten it on the rump. Taisia stole a glance at her “bodyguard” and, just as furtively, made a rude gesture with her left hand. So Nalensky wouldn’t see.

Ardan merely gave a brief shrug.

“Yes, yes, sweet Taisia.” Mr. Nalensky nodded several times. “That can happen, but don’t worry. Star Engineers are always conscientious in their work! Their inventions are exceptionally reliable.”

At that, Ardan hiccuped despite himself. Interesting. Given that the Senior Magister was a Star scholar in an entirely different field, was he genuinely mistaken, or did he simply not want to go into the details? For some reason, Ard leaned toward the first possibility.

“But then what’s the wire for, dear Chaz?” Taisia widened her eyes. To anyone watching, she might have looked frightened.

Sleeping Spirits... Miss Shpritz really could have become an immensely popular actress.

“It’s all because of the Anomalies and the animals, my dear Taisia.” Nalensky winked.

“Oh, Chaz, how bold you are.” The cloying sweetness of Taisia’s feigned rapture could have made a whole barrel of honey crystallize. “But let’s not rush things.”

“Of course, of course, dear Taisia.” The Senior Magister flushed with pride and promptly dropped the word “my.” “Now then. Anomalies and animals sense the Ley far more keenly, instinctively. They avoid places where its distortions are strongest. They used to call it ‘the influence of the Echo of the Ley.’ Now it’s ‘the vibration of the Paarlax Field.’ Or something like that. I haven’t delved very deeply into the engineers’ new terminology yet...”

Nalensky faltered a little over those last few words. Ardi had long since noticed that whenever the Senior Magister spoke on matters he didn’t understand, Nalensky suddenly bore a striking resemblance to Magister Tikhonov. Tikhonov, incidentally, was still listening to Miss Ostrozhskaya’s tirade as she demanded that he do the very thing she had failed to do herself.

“So the wagons’ racket and the voltage in the wire mean we don’t have to worry about something leaping out of the deep woods and forcing Mr. Zalessky and his brave men into action,” Nalensky said quickly.

“Well, dear Chaz... you’ve put my mind at ease.” Taisia shivered and tugged lightly on the reins to bring her mare closer to the Senior Magister. “Please tell me more about the Winged Horses.”

“Winged-Horned, dear Taisia.” Nalensky’s spirits rose again, and he laughed. Miss Shpritz laughed with him.

Ardan shook his head and left the pair alone. From a certain point of view, they thoroughly deserved each other. Ardi himself looked wistfully at the mixed forest surrounding them. At the clearing’s edge, pines and birches, firs and yews swayed overhead. In the whispering rustle of the foliage, Ardan heard a voice that somehow reminded him of his homeland, Alcade.

The forest called to him. It called with stubborn insistence, and at times with a welcome softness that was temptation itself. It called him to cast off the hated, constricting clothes, rank with sweat and the road. To kick off his uncomfortable boots and free his feet and the claws hidden in the pads of his toes. To draw the fresh, cool air of the old forest deep into his lungs.

It beckoned Ard with its winding paths, hidden from ordinary human eyes. It waited for the Hunter to cast off all the weight he’d accumulated during his time in a two-legged skin and plunge into the brush and moss. For his paws to grow strong and sturdy again. For his fangs to sink into the yielding throat of prey, so plentiful here in this ancient forest, which still remembered a time before two-legged prey began cutting into it in search of the cold stones under the earth.

The Hunter knew he had only to give in to the call. Only to leap down from the four-legged prey, whose heartbeat drummed so temptingly against his own body. Only to part with this strange, searing branch beside his thigh. Only to bid farewell to his Hunter-father’s false claw. Then he would find himself again.

Life would be simpler and easier again. His trail through the dreams of the Sleeping Spirits would stop twisting through pockets of fear, pain, and loneliness. And all the blood that would be spilled would belong only to prey and to those Hunters who chose to challenge his right to his own trails.

“Easy, easy, northern brother.” Ardan bent close to the ear of the anxious horse, which was a heartbeat from bucking, and stroked its neck. “It’s all right. You’re no prey of mine, and I’m no Hunter. I’m your brother from the far south, where white winds caress hills of stone. You and I, northern brother.”

“You and I,” the horse replied, a little awkwardly. Its heartbeat settled.

The horse had been ready to throw off the hungry Hunter who had somehow appeared on its back. But Ardi only smiled at a memory from his youth. Then he looked at the staff lashed to the saddle and touched the wood that had once sheltered him and Grandfather from the scorching Alcade sun.

Ardi turned toward the old forest and whispered in the she-wolf’s tongue:

“Hello, Old House. I’m a guest here, and you’re the host. Please protect me, and I’ll do you no harm. Three times spoken and three times heard.”

The tops of the tall trees swayed. The wind ran among valleys and meadows, ravines and streams, badger burrows and bear dens, then licked Ard’s face with moisture it had carried from the summit of the Great Glacier. Somewhere a bird sang, and far off, barely audible, a wolf answered. No human would ever have heard or noticed any of it, but the matabar merely closed his eyes for a moment and smiled.

A snow leopard’s fearsome growl rang through his mind.

“You’re not even a real Hunter, Ardan. You’ve never been one, and you never will be!”

Once, long ago... but why pretend? Even two years ago, Ardan would have given a great deal to prove Ergar wrong. Yet as the voice of the Ice and Snow grew clearer to him, he spent longer hours over his books, using up jar after jar of ink. He walked home faster, too, sometimes even running, to breathe in the scent of spring flowers blooming beside the stream. In time, he came to understand one small but perhaps very important thing.

Ergar really was never supposed to become his teacher. The Guardian Spirit of the matabar, the Storm of the Mountain Peaks, had been bound by a promise made to Hector and the remnants of Aror’s former power. And despite all that, Ergar still fulfilled his duties. He taught little Ardi as best he could and loved him in his own way. As best he knew how.

And the thing that had once felt like a disgrace, especially to the “little Hunter,” now filled him with nothing but warmth. Yes, he wasn’t a Hunter. He would never become a Hunter like Hector, and even Erti, though still very young, was far more gifted at hunting than his older brother.

“Speaker,” whispered the ancient treetops in the tongue of the Fae, echoing the words of birds, wolves, earth, and wind. “Three times... spoken... three times... heard...”

NovelPhoenix's website carries the author's chapter, yet this reproduction was not authorized by them.

And perhaps Ardi only imagined it. Maybe he simply wanted to hear something in the whisper of that old forest, nearly untouched by human hands. Nalensky, still holding forth to Taisia, probably wanted the same. Or maybe, for the first time in Ardi’s life, Skusty wouldn’t have said, “You just don’t hear the world around you very well.” He would have said the exact opposite: “Ardi, it looks like you’ve cleaned out your ears!”

Ardan touched his staff again.

True, he wasn’t a Hunter, but for the first time in many years, it seemed to him that Ergar would have been proud of him. Even though Ergar would never have shown it openly.

Then a new thought occurred to Ardi, so funny he nearly laughed.

Ergar and Lord Aversky would probably have become quite good friends, assuming they didn’t try to kill each other on the spot.

***

Ardi struck his flint and steel, lit the dried pine fibers soaked in wax, and pushed them into a small tepee of stacked branches. He’d stacked the branches carefully to let air enter from below and flow all the way to the top, and the little fire caught at once. Ardan let it grow and take hold. Then he built a larger tepee from a dead spruce he’d felled an hour earlier, using wood he had already cut into logs and split for firewood.

By then, only a few groups of Hunters had gotten a fire going in the broad clearing, which was fenced off from the rest of the forest by those same posts and wire. That was how Bors and Rita wound up in a minor quarrel, arguing over who had the better claim to the wind-felled birch they’d spotted.

No one cut down live trees. This had less to do with lofty moral convictions than with the simple fact that building a fire from sap-soaked logs was no one’s idea of fun.

“Eternal Angels, Captain, be honest with me.” Taisia had climbed out of the tent they’d set up and was already clattering a spoon against a bowl. “Among those stuffy Star scholars of yours, does anyone ever let in a little fresh air? Honestly, I’d rather spend two hours in bed with an impotent man than five more minutes with Nalensky. At least he’d put his tongue to better use than talking my brain to mush.”

Ardan had given up even trying to appeal to Miss Shpritz’s sense of decorum or piety. It was useless anyway. So he simply accepted that they had two little flames burning now. Three, actually: the new little campfire and both of Ardan’s ears.

“By the Light, you get so adorably shy, Captain,” Taisia laughed. A genuine laugh. The real thing. “I could almost believe you weren’t anywhere close to thirty, Captain. More like you hadn’t even turned twenty.”

Ardan looked sharply up at her and narrowed his eyes. Everything had its limits.

Miss Shpritz immediately lifted a hand in a placating gesture.

“I’m sorry. I won’t question your story.” Taisia gave the final word a deliberately ambiguous inflection. “Let’s change the subject. Is it just me, or did you bring out more supplies than usual?”

“Yes,” Ardan replied, then began setting up the tripod for the cooking pot.

“Can I ask why? Or are you that hungry?”

For several seconds, Ardi fought the urge to put Skusty’s lessons in rhetoric to use against Taisia, but Ergar had taught him not to attack Hunters stronger than he was. Something told him Taisia wouldn’t even notice him fighting back in a war of words. And as for spending several hours by the fire as a target for the barbs of someone who made her living with words... Ardan would rather attend another evening of poetry. At least he could doze off there, even if he had to keep it secret from Tess.

“We’ll have guests,” he answered honestly.

Taisia’s eyebrows lifted slightly in surprise, but she didn’t pepper him with questions. She had a unique knack for knowing when not to push too far. Miss Shpritz did get on Ard’s nerves, but with the grace of a seasoned tightrope walker, she never pushed past the point where even his patience might finally run out.

What would he have done then?

Nothing special, really. He simply would have refused to perform any duties except those the Black House had specifically agreed to.

Once the fire was blazing, Ardan set several short logs beside it and laid two iron rods across them. He hefted a heavy cast-iron skillet onto the rods, then pulled several bear steaks, prepared ahead of time by Arkar, from his supply sack. And this was no ordinary bear meat. It hadn’t come from the gray, lumbering bears that hunted fish along the water’s edge. Those bears often carried all kinds of parasites; when fish was scarce, they ate carrion too. This meat came from bears that lived near the berry ridges. Over the course of a season, their meat sometimes took on so much sweetness from the berries that a single bite could make your whole mouth tingle.

“Is it just me, or does it smell like lingonberries?” Miss Shpritz asked, sniffing the air.

“Exactly.” Ardan’s eyes gleamed, and he all but licked his lips as he brushed the meat with garlic juice, salted it, and added Kargaam spices and plain black pepper.

He poured water into the pot and set it on the tripod a little way from the fire. Once the flames had licked at the cast iron long enough, he flicked a little water onto the skillet’s surface. The droplets did not evaporate. They sizzled and began bouncing across the surface.

The simple test told Ardan the metal was hot enough, and he slapped three steaks into the skillet. They immediately spat and hissed, sending a spicy, faintly sweet aroma drifting through the air.

The steaks needed a few minutes on each side, so Ardi took the last bit of butter made from mountain goat’s milk out of its little box. He also brought out a few sprigs and roots he had gathered here in the forest.

By then the water in the pot was boiling hard and spitting droplets over the rim, so Ardi added the buckwheat, which he had already picked over and rinsed. An old cowboy trick he had picked up back at the Polskih farm: rather than cover the buckwheat with cold water, bring it to a boil, and cook it until the water was absorbed, drop the buckwheat straight into water that’s already boiling.

Ardan put the lid on the pot, then adjusted the chain on the tripod so the bottom wouldn’t touch the flames.

He flipped the meat to sear the other side. From the fire he raked out several charred logs and some ash, then dug a small pit nearby. He spread a layer of ash in it and set the seared meat, wrapped in thick paper and tied with twine, on the white bed. He covered the pit with more of the same ash, laid the charred logs on top, and propped a burning brand against them.

The watch’s minute hand crept forward, and Taisia kept eating from her bowl with the same steady patience, her utensils clinking against it.

“You never cease to amaze me with your talents, Captain.” Miss Shpritz had even taken a seat by the fire, though until then she’d always complained about the smell of smoke. “I refuse to believe you learned all this on the farm.”

“Not just there.” Ardan shrugged and settled onto the log he used as a chair. “I wanted to spend more time with my mother, so I helped her in the kitchen. And when I went out onto the steppe with the cowboys, everyone started experimenting with cooking sooner or later, one way or another. Just to pass the time. And it gives you plenty to talk about.”

“Cooking?” Taisia asked, genuinely surprised.

“Yes.” Ardi nodded. “Which recipes everyone knows. What kind of meat works best. How to butcher a carcass. Which knife makes it easiest to trim the fat, where to slip the blade under the lymph nodes and sinews. All kinds of seasonings, too. You can talk for hours.”

Miss Shpritz seemed unable to believe what she’d heard.

“So, Captain, ten cowboys sit around a fire and discuss... cooking?”

“Among other things.” Ardan nodded again. “Cooking. Horses. Life. Exes. Jokes. Women.”

“Women came last?”

“Sorry?”

“You put women at the very end of the list.”

Ardan gave it a moment’s thought, then shrugged.

“Men talk about women far less often than you might think, Miss Shpritz,” he replied after a minute. “Take sleep, for example. Eternal Angels, if you tally it all up, you’ll find I’ve heard men argue more often about how to sharpen knives and clean revolvers than about anything to do with women.”

Taisia gave him a sidelong glance, then went back to watching the fire.

“So you didn’t join those conversations very often, I take it.”

Ardan followed her gaze. For a moment, he too lost himself in the chaotic dance of orange tongues still licking the bottom of the pan. Ardi snapped out of it and scraped away the remaining garlic juice and spices with spruce twigs. So they wouldn’t scorch. He didn’t feel like spending half an hour afterward with cold water and a wire brush for company.

“It’s not as though I’d had much opportunity,” Ardan replied evasively to the question that wasn’t quite a question. “And by the time everyone got used to me, I’d already gotten used to simply listening.”

“Did you like it?”

“What?” Ardan asked, confused.

“Listening.”

The fire crackled, the last twigs popping as they burned somewhere beneath the heavy logs, where scarlet sparks darted amid the black mosaic of coals. Ardan had spent so many evenings like this out on the wind-swept Alcade steppe, where the space between one hill and the next felt as wide as the whole horizon.

“Yes,” he answered honestly.

Taisia seemed to smile faintly. Ardi didn’t see it. He kept watching the fire.

“Because you don’t have to think about anything, right?” Miss Shpritz said, a little more quietly than usual. “And because out on the steppe, it’s as though there’s no past or future. Your whole life feels as if it’s out there somewhere, Captain. Beyond the next pass or the next stream. No worries, no cares. Or rather, there are worries, but only the ones that belong to the moment: problems you solve with your hands instead of brooding over them, and only while they’re right in front of you. Once you’ve dealt with them, you can pull your hat down over your eyes and not worry about a thing. Just doze and listen to the wind.”

Ardan slowly turned toward Miss Shpritz. Telltale tears gathered at the corners of her eyes.

“Your husband...”

“Fiancé,” Taisia corrected. “He served in the marshals’ corps near Taya. We met when I went to the border to report on an illegal fishing operation the local Governor-General was protecting. I was probably only a little older at the time than you are now.”

Ardi turned sharply, but everyone in camp was too busy preparing for the night and tending to dinner. No one had a thought to spare for a scrap of conversation between two people beside a cheerful little fire.

“What happened?” Ardan finally asked.

Taisia didn’t answer at once. Not for a long while. Before she did, Ardi had already added butter to the buckwheat, pulled the meat from the pit, tossed more butter and a few sprigs of herbs into the skillet, and set it back over the fire to cook the bear meat through.

“A bullet, Captain. Just a bandit’s bullet. Nothing supernatural.” Taisia’s voice wavered slightly. “The Governor-General was so mired in corruption that he’d managed to become the little lapdog of a gang of train robbers. A jewelry firm was shipping a consignment of diamonds from the Ralsk mines to the Metropolis. A big score. My... fiancé and his fellow marshals decided to lay an ambush. But word of the ambush reached the Town Hall. The result: everyone died. The bandits. The marshals... He loved to cook too. Thomas. He could ramble on for hours, telling stories about the steppe and cooking. Back then, it all seemed so silly to me.”

Ardan said nothing. And what could he say? “I understand”? No, he didn’t. For all Ardi had lived through, none of it gave him so much as a footnote to add to Taisia’s story. Because it was her story. Hers alone. And a simple “I’m sorry”... No, Ard felt for her, of course he did, but his two years in the Metropolis had taught him one simple truth...

“Thank you.” Taisia wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand, trying not to let anyone notice.

“For what?”

“For not saying all sorts of nonsense,” Miss Shpritz replied.

Ardi gave a dry, joyless smile.

“Just please don’t try to shoot me later.”

This time, Miss Shpritz was the one who flinched.

“Don’t take that personally,” Ardan hastened to add. He put several spoonfuls of buckwheat into Taisia’s bowl and laid the meat on top. The recipe called for letting the meat rest, but Ardi often ignored that step. He liked his food hot. “It’s just that you made me think of a woman. Her name was Maryana Sestrova.”

“Maryana... A beautiful name.” Taisia nodded. “What did you do to push her so far that she tried to shoot you, Captain? Mind you, I think about it myself sometimes, but then I’d have to hide the body. Make up some plausible story. Frankly, you’re not worth that kind of trouble.”

Maryana’s words came back to him: “You know why the children kept disappearing? This is why, Corporal. Because no one gives a damn. You think I even had to forge the documents? I just burned them! Right there in the sheriff’s Town Hall! That was all. Because no one gives a damn. That’s why... for so many years...”

“Partly because I needed to kill her brother,” Ardan said, and Taisia’s breath caught. “Which is exactly what I did. Along the way, I also destroyed what had been her home. Unloved, perhaps, but still a home. As for Maryana herself, she ended up spending her last days as a test subject in a lab inside a building you and I both know quite well.”

Miss Shpritz slowly turned toward Ard, then, just as slowly, turned her gaze back to the fire.

“Have you ever wondered, Captain, why you and I go through life surrounded by broken people? And I don’t even mean your service in that building or my job at the paper,” Taisia asked, her voice even quieter than before. She answered her own question at once. “Maybe it’s because the Eternal Angels take such care to protect normal, healthy souls, the ones that haven’t been fed through a meat grinder full of shit and blood? So people like us can live here, you know, locked in a fucking pen with our own kind. With people just as broken as the two of us.”

Ardi said nothing as he dished up another helping for their guest, who was running a little late. All in all, that fit the first impression he’d made.

“Haven’t you ever thought,” Taisia repeated, “that the happiness you’ve found has less to do with ending up with a partner from a military family than with the fact that she was kidnapped more than once as a child? Once for ransom, and once by people who meant to kill her.”

Ardan felt his fangs begin to cut into his gums. His fingers tightened too hard around the spoon. He knew. Tess had mentioned those events only once, in passing, but had never gone into detail. And Ardi had never asked. He himself had never gone into detail about exactly how his father had died.

Sometimes it’s enough simply to warn someone that nightmares exist without making them relive every detail of what happened.

“A woman so beautiful and talented could have had her pick of the Empire’s most prominent suitors.” Taisia reached toward the fire and held her palm near the flame long enough for her skin to redden. “But she chose you… You know, Captain, it’s like putting a mosaic together. Except you don’t fit the pieces together side by side; you work from the top down. And if two pieces are whole, or almost whole, they’re easier to join than pieces that have been broken. So the broken end up looking for the broken.”

Ardan sighed and set the bowl of food on a nearby log. More than once, he’d thought of the Second Chancery as a peculiar sort of last refuge for people who, as Milar put it, had been “bitten by our shitty reality.” But somehow, until this very conversation with Taisia, caustic and sharp-tongued and brave, he had missed the one detail that had been in plain sight all along. That maybe he, too, wore black for the very same reason.

“Maybe that’s why you kept quiet when you worked with the cowboys? Because you and I have nothing to talk about with people who are whole.” Taisia closed her eyes for a moment. “If they even exist, of course. Whole people... Though I suppose everything is relative.”

Ardan shrugged even though he knew Taisia couldn’t see him.

“Broken, terrifying monsters, failures all, standing guard over the peace and well-being of people who are whole and unharmed, though at times unhappy, each in their own way.”

“Are you quoting someone?” Ardan asked.

“Yes.” Taisia opened her eyes and turned her face up to the light of the moon as it emerged from behind the clouds. “Myself, Captain. I’m thinking of using it in my article. What do you think? Does it sound poetic enough?”

Ardi grimaced.

“Then it sounds perfect.” Taisia nodded.

Ard looked at Taisia. Come to think of it, the dream of the Sleeping Spirits had put them on the same path before Ardan even remembered how to speak Galessian.

A brief scene flashed through Ardan’s mind, one he had dismissed long ago without a second thought. A headline in yet another newspaper, one Neviy had used as a plate for a particularly greasy bun.

“The Miraculous Recovery of the Daughter of Great Prince Paul, Heir to the Throne, and Duchess Anorsky.

“Sorcery or Science?

“An investigative report by Taisia Shpritz, seventeen months after the events...”

“There’s another line, Miss Shpritz.”

“And what would that be?”

A line from one of Atta’nha’s scrolls rose in Ard’s mind.

“There is nothing the legless would not give for a dance, nothing the armless would not trade for an embrace, and nothing the heartless would not twist and call love.”

For a moment, only the crackle of the fire broke their silence. Ardi served himself some food as well. His stomach was already growling.

“Who said it?” Taisia asked, tapping her spoon against the rim of her bowl.

“The last king of Ectassus.”

Taisia sat a little while longer, then got to her feet, picked up her bowl and a couple of slices of bread, and went back into the tent.

“Forgive me, Miss Shpritz. Is this a bad time?” Magister Evlampiy Tikhonov emerged from the darkness. Round and soft, with such warm, kind eyes and an utterly open face. “Captain Skofsky invited me to join you for dinner. My apologies if I’m late. I wanted to sneak this past the others.”

The Magister drew a bottle of Lintelar from beneath his yellow cloak, a vintage older than Ard himself.

“Well, at least there’s one good thing today!” Taisia sounded far livelier than before. With one deft motion, she snatched the bottle from the Magister’s hands. “The captain doesn’t drink, and this is bad for you, Tikhonov. So let me spare you this bottle. It’ll make my rotten evening a little brighter.”

“But... what about...”

Before Magister Tikhonov could voice so much as an objection, Taisia had already vanished into the tent, where she lit a lamp, as she always did.

“Oh dear, oh dear.” The Magister shook his head and walked over to Ard. They shook hands and settled down by the fire. “Forgive me, Captain. I’ve always been shy. Especially around beautiful women.”

“No harm done, Magister.” Ardan was quick to reassure him and held out a bowl of buckwheat and bear meat. “Help yourself.”

Tikhonov breathed in the aroma, then licked his lips without a hint of self-consciousness, almost like a child.

“Incredible, Captain! You weren’t exaggerating one bit when you said you’d give me a whole feast in exchange for my story!”

“Well, ‘feast’ might still be a bit strong...”

“No, no,” Tikhonov rushed on and clinked his knife against his fork. “It smells so good my stomach’s growling. But what’s dinner without good conversation? So... what did you want to know about our equipment and the Winged-Horned Horses?”

Ardan raised his bowl in salute as though it were a wineglass.

“Everything your confidentiality agreement allows, Magister Tikhonov.”

Tikhonov laughed, a warm, genuine laugh.

“You can call me Evlampiy, Captain,” he assured him. “And since you signed exactly the same agreement I did, I can tell you anything that interests you. So please tell me where to start.”

“In that case...” Ardi paused to think. “Let’s start with the equipment.”

“Excellent! You see, I had something of a passion for Star Engineering in my youth, so if I put my mind to it, I can even give you a reasonably coherent account! All right, here goes...”

As he wolfed down his dinner, Magister Tikhonov launched into a long explanation of the gear the Hunters’ Guild had hauled across half the country. Now and then, Ardi’s attention wandered, and he cast a furtive glance at Taisia’s tent.

Tess, Boris and Elena, Bazhen, Arkar, Milar, and Anastasia...

Even if Taisia was mistaken, perhaps her assumptions weren’t all that far from the truth.

But those were thoughts for tomorrow.