The order had four sentences.
Cahir had read it at Marnadal, in the dark before the crossing, by a torch someone had been holding at the wrong angle so that the wax dripped onto the leather of his gauntlet and he had not moved to avoid it.
He had read it again in the early morning, at the lower wall’s fall.
He was reading it now, at the foot of the keep switchbacks, in the orange light of a city that was still mostly alive and would not be by evening.
Locate the heir of Cintra.
That was the first sentence.
She will be ash-haired, twelve years, the Lion’s bloodline.
That was the second.
Take her alive and unharmed to the southern crossing.
The third.
And then the fourth, which was the one that mattered: Fail in nothing.
Four sentences from an Emperor who had never in Cahir’s experience needed more than four sentences for anything, because an Emperor who needed more than four sentences to give an order had failed to think the order through before giving it.
He folded the paper and put it back in the dispatch-pouch against his ribs and looked up the switchbacks.
The smoke was coming from the upper works — the stable, from the smell, and something older and more expensive underneath that.
The keep’s gate was still closed.
His advance unit had a sergeant named Vrann at the lead, a competent man who understood that “unharmed” applied to the objective and not to anything between him and the objective, which was a distinction that made a sergeant useful and would make him dangerous if he ever confused the two.
“Vrann,” Cahir said.
Vrann turned.
He had the braced look of someone expecting to be told to be careful — and the resentment of having been told it too often.
“The gate,” Cahir said.
“Not the wall.
Not the towers.
The gate.”
“The wall is faster.”
“The gate is the order.”
Vrann looked at the wall, which was faster.
Then he looked at Cahir, who had the kind of face that had stopped doing the work of expression some time ago and relied instead on the rank and the silence to carry the weight.
“The gate,” Vrann said, and turned and passed it down.
Cahir climbed.
He had been in four cities when they fell, counting this one.
Three had been different in kind — different in the texture of how a civilian population moved through disintegration, what it sounded like, what it smelled like, how the people who had been living ordinary lives yesterday rearranged themselves around the fact that today was different.
Cintra sounded different from the others.
It sounded angrier, which he’d expected — the Lioness’s city, her people. New chapters come out on g.com first.
What he had not expected was how quiet the anger was.
The people moving through the lower streets were not screaming.
They were moving fast and low and silent, which was the sound of a population that had decided not to give the invading force the satisfaction of their terror, and which was, Cahir thought, not a small thing.
He noticed it and filed it and climbed.
The dispatch-pouch had other papers.
Camp correspondence, supply-chain summaries, a count from the infantry quartermaster that was three days old and already wrong.
And at the bottom — he’d noticed it at Marnadal and hadn’t read it because it had come through the lower wall’s watch-officer channel and watch-officer reports from a city you’re preparing to take were generally not worth the carrier’s time — a wall-report.
Three lines.
He read them now, moving, the smoke thickening above him.
White-haired boy.
Eastern rampart.
Moved air.
Day -3.
Three lines and a watch-officer’s signature.
He read it twice and put it back.
A boy who moved air.
Wall-officers in cities under pre-assault pressure wrote down everything, because the pressure made everything look like signal, and most of it was not.
A market rumor about a flying boy was the kind of thing that happened in a city that was already frightened — frightened people saw what they were looking for, and a city that could sense what was coming started looking for miracles.
He filed it in the back of his head where things went when they were probably nothing and he was not quite ready to discard them.
The keep gate was wood and iron, and it had been built to hold against a ram for twenty minutes.
Vrann’s unit had a small ram in pieces, which Vrann had insisted on carrying since the Marnadal staging despite the weight, on the grounds that a man who showed up to a gate-fight without a ram was a man who had failed to think the gate-fight through in advance.
This was the correct reasoning, and it was why Vrann was a sergeant.
The ram went together in the time it took the Cintran guards above to decide whether they were going to hold or not.
The decision took too long — which told Cahir that there were fewer of them than the wall looked like it should have — and then the decision came back as “hold,” which was the decision of men who had been told to, not men who believed they could.
Cahir watched the gate and thought about the four sentences.
Take her alive and unharmed.
He had taken prisoners before.
He had escorted civilians, transported assets, held lines for political reasons that were explained to him in briefings and which he accepted as the parameters of the work.
He had done none of these things and asked why in any terms beyond the tactical.
The why belonged to the Emperor.
But this was a child.
Not the first child he’d been ordered to manage — there were children in sieges, there were children in every category of difficult military situation — but this was a specific child, with four sentences about her that included the word unharmed twice if you read the fourth sentence as encompassing everything in the first three, and an Emperor did not send a field knight with a sealed dispatch to retrieve something he could have retrieved with a transport unit.
An Emperor sent a field knight when the thing being retrieved required judgment.
Judgment meant the thing was complicated.
He had not yet allowed himself to ask why one child was complicated.
He was asking it now, in the smoke-smell of a gate that was going to give in the next two minutes, and the question was not a comfortable one.
The ram hit the gate.
Hit it again.
The gate said something in the language of stressed timbers, which was the language of a thing that was going to say yes but hadn’t decided quite when.
Cahir watched the smoke above the keep and thought about a girl with ash-colored hair and the Emperor’s personal interest in her survival, and understood that the questions he was choosing not to ask were already answering themselves in the space he’d left them, and that this was going to be a problem at some point.
Not today.
Today was the gate.
The gate came in on the third hit.
Vrann’s unit went through first, as was correct — a field knight going first through a gate was a field knight with poor management skills and a romantic attachment to gestures.
Cahir followed at the second wave, noting the two defenders who had been standing behind the gate and who were now sitting down with the specific look of men who had made the rational calculation and come to the rational conclusion, and whom he directed with a gesture to his left, where two of his rearguard were already establishing a holding position.
“The towers first,” he said, to Vrann’s back.
“Then the inner keep.
Nobody goes up the stairs without me.”
“And the girl.”
“Nobody touches the girl.”
Vrann passed it down again, this time in the tone of a man passing down an order he had already passed down twice and would pass down as many more times as needed because that was the job, and the job was what he had, and there was nothing else to say about it.
Cahir looked at the inner keep’s doors and thought about a wall-report in his dispatch-pouch and a boy who moved air, and put it in the back with the other things that were probably nothing.
He climbed the inner stairs.
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