would shake. She would force herself out onto that balcony but she would cling to Gavin. She would be terrified and embarrassed. He would be thrilled.
At the solstice, Judah would be with them, but this time she hadn’t been invited. She could have been in bed or having breakfast or washing her feet. But she had wanted to see for herself as Elban strode down the aisle his guard made for him, as he leapt onto the back of the warhorse. When it felt his weight in the saddle, the horse tossed its head, hooves restless on the cobblestones. It was eager to go. Judah was eager to see it, and its rider, gone. From the saddle, Elban scanned the crowd. She didn’t think he could see her in her shadowed corner. He paid no attention to Darid. “The gate!” he cried, and each guard began to stomp one heavy boot down on the cobbles, in perfect time with the drums. The two ancient winches groaned to life, six men at each, and the enormous wooden gates, thicker than a human being was long, began to part as the great House opened its mouth to speak the army into the world. Judah had never seen the Lord’s Square from the ground before. Now, if not for the guard, she could walk out into it; stand on its surface and wave to Gavin and Elly. The cobblestones in the courtyard were the same as those in the Square. For some reason, that was what she found most startling: the cobblestones continued.
Gates fully open, the House held its breath. Then Elban gave a mighty cry; the drums quickened; the guard began to move, boots still keeping time with the drums. The drums themselves began to move, pulled on wagons by small tough ponies that, Judah knew, would be the first to be eaten, if it came to hunger. The mass of men and weapons that moved through the gates, slow and relentless, would rumble through the city to the bivouac outside Highfall, where another hundred men waited. Then they would move on to the next town, and the next bivouac, and between collected forces and conscriptions picked up along the way, the guard that seemed so fearsome inside the Wall would be but the smallest, deadliest portion of the army that eventually boarded the ships and sailed across the strait to Nali territory. A smaller portion still would return. For all their training and weaponry, they were nothing but rocks thrown at the enemy, and some of the rocks would break through and some would fly wild and some would simply shatter, because even a rock could break. Particularly when it was made of flesh and bone and blood.
For now, though, they were fearsome. Judah didn’t look at the faces beneath the helmets. Because she understood, seeing the guard on the march, what Elban had said—that people were simply tools—and found it horrible. Their willingness to follow him, their acceptance of their fate. Prisoners, he’d said. Men with death sentences, given a chance to live again. They belonged to Elban, too, and perhaps she found that most frightening of all, because the next time this featureless mass marched, she would be among them. As would Gavin. Tools, waiting to be used.
Gavin’s father spurred his horse and rode, as the drum carts began to roll and the army with it. Judah observed Elban’s white hair, the bony shoulders, the perfect straight line of his back. He would chain her like a dog and do whatever he wanted with her. She added this knowledge to the long list of things she could not bear and could not help: like the long days in his study so long ago; like Arkady’s cold hands poking and prodding before that last afternoon, when Gavin had felt her fear and revulsion and come in with a knife; like the mother she’d surely had but knew nothing about. There was nothing to do but endure. So she merely stood—apart from the acrobats and musicians and those few courtiers who’d managed an early start, apart from the remaining guards and the Seneschal at their head—and waited for the last marcher to pass under the arch, for the great drums to follow them. By then the sun was rising. The cobbles in the Lord’s Square were touched with pink and gold as the entertainers began to trail after the army. Across the courtyard, Darid waited to be dismissed. Maybe he saw