attention seemed to be on a flock of birds that soared and swooped over the manors on the Square.
Judah felt like a bird herself, straining at the end of a tether. If Elban was injured—if he was seriously injured...oh, if he died—there would be no next campaign. There would be no life on the end of Elban’s chain, no blood spilled for the sake of a troop movement. Gavin would be Lord of the City. Elly would be Lady. Judah didn’t know what her own future held, but with Elban dead, it would have to be better than anything she’d expected.
And on top of it all: to see Elban die. To stand over his corpse. That would be sweet. Perhaps she would steal the corpse from his crypt and throw it to the hounds.
The drums were very loud. The day promised to be clear and lovely. Ten minutes after Judah caught the glint of sun on armor down the broad avenue at the end of the Square, she caught the flutter of Elban’s banner, and ten minutes after that she could discern upon it the red-and-gold dagger that was his emblem. Below the balcony, Judah heard the grinding of the winches as the gates in the Wall began to roll open.
The officers marching at the front of the column weren’t as battered as Judah had expected. Those who were courtiers—and only those from very poor or very large families joined the army—wore armor enameled with the colors of their individual lineages, and their horses’ skirts and head plumes were still clean and fluffy. Here and there, she spotted a bandaged arm in a sling. Only a handful of horses rode empty, and most of those were clearly nothing Darid had bred. On the battlefield, the living horses of dead officers were usually appropriated by the living officers of dead horses, but because it was tradition to lead a fallen officer’s horse riderless back into the city, the army would pick up any horse they could on their way home to make up the difference: buying them, trading them, or—more often—just taking them in Elban’s name. The new horses would be dressed in the colors of the fallen and led as if they belonged. If they were worth breeding, Darid had always kept them. If not, he was supposed to kill them, but he’d confessed to Judah that he usually put them to work, or quietly let them out to pasture until they died on their own.
Thinking of him hurt. She didn’t know who ran the stables now, or what they would do with the outside horses.
After the officers, half of the Lord’s Guard marched on foot: first the spearmen, then the archers. Here, too, it was traditional to leave a space empty for a fallen comrade. A few gaps showed in the ranks like missing teeth but, again, not as many as Judah would have expected. It seemed to her that the ranks seemed smaller overall, but she’d never paid much attention.
“There should be more of them,” she heard Gavin mutter on the other side of Elly. She could feel his dismay. Something was off, besides the numbers. Her brain sensed it, but she couldn’t pin it down.
Next came the prisoners. There was only one this time. Instead of being marched in chains ahead of Elban himself, he stood in a barred iron cage on wheels, pulled by two outside horses. His arms were bound over his head to the top of the cage; he winced with every cobble, and Judah’s own shoulders ached in sympathy, remembering full well how much being bound that way hurt. She had expected some sort of elaborate costume but his clothes were ordinary, brown trousers and a sleeveless tunic and boots. He could have been any man from Highfall, except for his coloring: his short-cropped hair was as black as Darid’s colt’s, his bruised, dirty skin white as skimmed milk. At least, she thought it was. His arms were covered in tattoos. Nobody in Highfall wore tattoos. Fashions changed too quickly and tattoos couldn’t be undone.
After the prisoner and the guards surrounding him came Elban’s riderless horse. A glorious black, huge and proud and so very clearly Darid’s work—so like the colt she’d loved—that Judah’s heart ached. The horse didn’t seem to mind that his saddle was empty. His steps were proud and his coat gleamed. Even the silverwork on his saddle seemed recently polished.
Behind him, surrounded by a phalanx of guards, was the