is. I know Ceura well enough to know that a king can’t rule with an iron sword, and there’s no such thing as an aceuran sa’ceurai.”
Lantano Garuwashi raised an eyebrow. He glanced at the sheathed sword on his hip. “If you wish to reprise our duel in the wood, I will oblige. Feir Cousat went into the Wood that day after my sword. As none ever has before, he returned, on my word as a sa’ceurai. I still bear Ceur’caelestos. If you force me to draw it, I will sate its spirit with your blood.”
It was a serious oath, but the words of his vow didn’t mean what he wanted Kylar to infer. “You bear nothing but a scabbard and a hilt. Say that I lie, Garuwashi, and I’ll stand before your tent and challenge you before your army. Your sa’ceurai will tear you apart with their bare hands when they find you’ve lost Ceur’caelestos.”
The muscles on Garuwashi’s jaw stood out. He said nothing for a long time. “Curse you,” he said finally. The iron in him seemed to melt. “Curse you for taking my sword, and curse Feir for making me live. He did come out of the Wood. He said he’d been chosen to make another Ceur’caelestos for me. He knew the sa’ceurai would never understand, so he gave me this hilt and swore to return by spring. I believed him.” Garuwashi breathed deeply. “And now you come again to destroy me. I don’t know whether to hate you or admire you, Night Angel. I almost had you. I saw it in your face. Do you never run out of tricks?”
Kylar didn’t let his guard down. “You don’t even want Cenaria, do you? You just thought it would be another quick victory that would make your legend grow.”
“What is a warleader without war, Night Angel? I was invincible before I took Ceur’caelestos, and now you wish me to lose—against Cenaria? You don’t know what it is to lead men.”
“I know what it is to kill them. I know what it is to ask others to pay for my mistakes.”
“Do you know what it is to refuse to be satisfied with the meager portion life hands you? I think you do. Can you imagine me squatting in a field next to my one servant with my trousers rolled up, picking rice? These hands were not made for a hoe. You took this name Kylar Stern. Why? Because you were born with an iron sword, too.
“My men need food, but they need victory more. With me or without me, they are here for the winter,” Lantano Garuwashi said. “The tunnels we widened to get through the mountains are rivers and ice now. If you expose me, the sa’ceurai will kill me, but then what? They will vent their fury on your people. For everyone’s sake, Night Angel, let that go. Go instead and tell this queen to surrender. I give you my word that if she does this, not a single Cenarian will die. We will take nothing more than food and a place to winter. She will be granted her throne once more when we leave in the spring.”
And you won’t ask for anything else once you have Cenaria and Ceur’caelestos both, right?
Kylar shook his head. “You’ll surrender.”
“I can’t,” Garuwashi said through gritted teeth. “In surrender, even Cenarians lay down their swords at the victor’s feet.”
Kylar hadn’t thought of that. It wasn’t the thought of surrender that was impossible for Lantano Garuwashi, it was the physical act.
“Maybe,” Kylar said, “maybe there’s a third way.”
27
When Dorian’s half-brother Paerik had brought his army to Khaliras to seize the throne, he had abandoned a vital post. The general who had served under him, General Talwin Naga, stood in front of the throne, explaining how the wild men would invade in the spring.
“Sixty thousand of them?” Dorian asked. “How could they raise so many?”
“Raise may be exactly the word, Your Holiness,” the tiny Lodricari man who had accompanied General Naga said.
“Who are you?” Dorian asked.
“This is Ashaiah Vul,” the general said. “He was your father’s Raptus Morgi, Keeper of the Dead. I think you need to hear what he can tell you.”
“I’ve never heard of such an office,” Dorian said. And “raptus” didn’t primarily mean keeper, either. It meant taker, stealer. Dorian’s stomach turned.
“By your father’s order and his father’s before him, it was a quiet office, Your Holiness,” Ashaiah Vul said. He was utterly bald, with a knobby skull and a pinched