Part 1
I did say have some faith, darling.
James did not answer Seraphina.
His hand was already at Bisera's face. He pressed two fingers against the side of her neck, just below her jaw, where no armour covered her. Her skin was warm, but for a moment he could find no pulse. Velika shifted the lantern. James kept still.
Then a faint beat pressed against his fingers, quick and stubborn. Another followed almost at once.
A thin breath misted above her parted lips. He waited for the next and saw it leave her. He tried to speak. His breath caught; the hand he set beside her head could not stop shaking.
"She's—" he said.
That was all that would come.
"Breathing?" Velika demanded.
He nodded.
Velika shut her eyes for the space of one breath. Against his pack saddle, Vesmir made a sound James had never heard from him, half a laugh and half something rawer. "Spirit be thanked," he said hoarsely. "Spirit be thanked."
When Velika opened her eyes, she was a healer again.
"Keep watching her breathing, Great Mage. Saralta, her other side. Lady—" Velika hesitated, looking at the veiled woman. "Hold the mantle clear, please."
James watched Bisera's lips. A faint mist appeared, vanished, then appeared again. He counted each breath with gratitude. Thank you, he thought, and did not know whether he was saying it to Seraphina, to the woman in silk, or to whatever stood behind them both.
"She's breathing. Sixteen a minute," he managed. "Shallow, but regular." His voice broke anyway.
"Good." Velika set the lantern where she could see Bisera's face and took hold of the nearest gauntlet. "That is good. Hold her wrist. Under, not over. The strap is stiff."
James supported Bisera's forearm while Velika loosened the strap and drew the gauntlet off, joint by joint, as though it might take skin with it.
Her hand was warm.
All winter he had warmed that hand between his own, grateful for one small thing he could do for her. Tonight her fingers were warmer than his.
On her finger sat the silver ring.
He had watched it disappear beneath this gauntlet before dawn. All afternoon he had imagined someone would return it from Podem with a few careful words.
He touched his own ring to hers. Silver met silver with a sound so small that only the rings could have heard it.
"There," Velika said quietly. "Now let go of her, so I can see what we are dealing with."
James lowered her hand onto the blanket and drew back.
With his hands empty, he looked properly at the woman who had brought her.
She knelt at Bisera's head, holding the widow's mantle back from the straps as Velika had asked. Melted snow beaded on her bare shoulders, and the skin beneath it was smooth and perfect. Above the veil, her eyes were steady and unlined. If he had not heard Saralta call her Mother, he would have taken her for a sister.
Saralta was in her mid-twenties. Back home, that would have made her mother fifty-something. But Bisera had once told him, quite seriously, that at twenty-six—twenty-six—she was eight years past the age when a Vakerian noblewoman ought to have married. Saralta's mother might be only in her early forties.
That might explain it.
Mostly. Even if she had borne Saralta in her teens, she still looked far too young.
She was watching Bisera's breathing as closely as he had. She knelt, reached and leaned exactly as Velika did. On Velika it was work. In that gown, with the lantern light following her every movement, the same motions radiated effortless allure. Saralta's mother did not seem to notice the cold, or how hard the two men in the tent were trying not to look.
Vesmir had averted his eyes to stare at the linen above his head.
Saralta noticed. Colour flooded her face again. She unclasped her fur-lined cloak and held it out to her mother.
"I am not cold," her mother said.
"It is not for the cold, Mother."
Her mother's eyes went to Vesmir's upturned face, then to James's ears, which had begun to burn. "Ah," she said. Then, she let Saralta settle the cloak around her shoulders.
Saralta saw James's ears. Even James. Her mother had only to kneel in a tent, and every man in it burned.
He never blushed like that for me.
Then she remembered the bedframe incident at James's place.
Her face, already warm, went furiously red.
James saw her colour deepen and assumed it was her mother's dress.
When Saralta spoke again, it was in Vakerian, with a formality James had rarely heard from her.
"Captain Velika. This is my mother, Lady Yuying, a consort of Prince Tugor of Rosagar."
Velika drew a sharp breath. Against his pack saddle, Vesmir did the same.
Her mother's hands went still on the mantle.
"Yuying," she said very gently. "Only Yuying, tonight. And I would prefer that no one learns of my presence here beyond this tent."
Saralta's lips stayed parted on the rest of it. A look passed between mother and daughter that James could not read and Saralta evidently could. She closed her mouth.
"Captain Velika," Saralta said to her mother. "Captain Vesmir." A breath. "And the Great Mage James." Her chin lifted. "Bisera's husband."
Velika's gaze went from daughter to mother and back, like a quartermaster checking a tally that would not balance.
"Lady Yuying," she said, taking care over the unfamiliar name and keeping the title anyway. Then she laced her raw fingers together and pressed them to her heart, as James had once seen Bisera do on her knees in his basement when she thanked the Spirit. She held it for one breath, head bowed. James had never seen a Vakerian offer it to anyone but the Spirit.
"You brought her back to us," she said, going back to the straps. "I will not forget it. And your name stays in this tent." A strap came free.
Vesmir had pushed himself up on one elbow.
"Lie still," Velika said without looking round. "The lady will forgive you for not standing."
Vesmir lay back. "Our deepest gratitude, Lady Yuying," he said while facing the linen.
Yuying inclined her head to each of them in turn without lowering her veil, the same small, exact courtesy for the mage as for the captains. Her eyes came to James last and rested, briefly, on his ring again.
"Thank you," James said. It came out rough. It was far short of the gratitude in his heart.
"Keep your thanks until she wakes," Yuying said.
James had a hundred questions for Yuying. From the set of Velika's mouth, and the way Vesmir frowned at the linen above his head, so did they. First among the questions was how a woman in a silk gown managed to rescue and carry an armoured general out of a live battle zone fully surrounded by enemy soldiers. None of them asked. Bisera came first.
Then James allowed himself the most important question. "What happened to her?"
"She spent all her mana and kept fighting," Yuying said. "There are long cuts in her left thigh, above the knee, and in this forearm." She leaned across to touch the binding at the edge of the vambrace. Yuying's cloak slid from one shoulder, and James quickly fixed his eyes on the binding.
What is wrong with me?
To James, before this evening, Saralta's mother had been a woman somewhere on the steppe. Now she was kneeling across from him in a form that he had not known was possible.
"I used a sleeping potion on a cloth," Yuying went on. "She would not have come willingly."
"No." Velika's hands stopped. "She would not have."
Nobody else spoke. Saralta looked down.
Velika bent close to Bisera's face and breathed in. Her brows drew together. She thumbed back one eyelid; the pupil was wide despite the lantern, and Bisera's lips were dry and cracking. "That's not far from the sponges the surgeons use before cutting. But theirs take a while."
"The same idea," Yuying agreed, and did not elaborate. "Afterwards, among the reeds of the channel, I took off enough armour to reach the wounds and closed what I could. Then I bound them and put the armour back on."
"Back on?"
"It held the dressings on the road. And it ensured that nothing was left behind for the Gillyrians to track."
"Wait. Closed," Velika said, "but not healed?"
"Not healed. I could stop the bleeding. I could not give back the blood she had lost. She will be weak, and she will hurt when she wakes."
James looked at Bisera's face. The thought of her waking in pain was terrible. But he was glad that she could wake at all.
"How much of her current sleep is due to the effect of the potion?" he asked.
"At first, all of it. By now, less—but not none. It lingers, and she may wake wild from it." Yuying looked down at Bisera. "The rest is her own body, recovering from her wounds and her exhaustion."
Seraphina's blue panel appeared at the edge of James's sight.
Emergency treatment suggested for severe blood loss, incompletely repaired wounds, residual sedative, dehydration, and exhaustion.
Blood replacement (O-negative, warmed; reassess after each unit). Calcium after the first unit. Antibiotic. Tetanus vaccine and tetanus immune globulin, separate sites—patient has never been immunised. Anti-nausea medication if she retches. Fluids by mouth once she can swallow. Continued observation required.
Beneath it, in the fine print:
Recommended environment for healing: indoors, warm, supervised.
Then, there was a catalogue of purchasable items.
He did not look at the prices.
Yes, he thought.
Of course, darling. Keep her warm while I arrange the rest. I will guide you when you need me.
You recommended somewhere warm and indoors. Could you bring us to my place? he thought.
Soon. First the blood transfusion. A heart this empty is not something I move on a whim.
"Velika, whatever you need. Tell me."
"Dry linen. Warm water. And hands that are not shaking."
Could I have those too? Whatever they cost.
Sure, my dear.
James looked down and realized that his hands had not fully stopped shaking. But he braced them beneath Bisera's shoulder as Velika directed anyway.
Then they laid her on the padded litter Seraphina had manifested, off the frozen ground, all four of them lifting together so that she stayed flat during the transfer.
Then, Saralta reached for the hem of the mail.
"Not yet." Velika caught her wrist. "She's too empty. Blood first, then the iron."
On Seraphina's instruction, James went round to Bisera's other side, and Saralta gave him her place. He drew off the other gauntlet and vambrace himself and pushed mail and arming-coat sleeve together up her forearm as far as they would go. His first try, on the back of her hand, found nothing; the lost blood had sunk her veins.
Higher, darling, Seraphina said.
He went higher up the forearm. At the second attempt, her brow creased.
"Good," Velika said. "She feels it."
James taped the line down. Before he opened the clamp, he counted her pulse against the seconds Seraphina laid at the corner of his sight. In the cave, months ago, he had hung a bag of saline from a spur of rock. Tonight the bag was dark red and warm in his hand, and he tied it to the tent pole.
Yuying had watched the litter manifest out of thin air. One moment there had been frozen ground beside the Great Mage; the next there was a litter, with blankets folded on it and a bag as clear as glass, full of something as dark as wine. She had felt nothing gather in him. No current of mana moving through his body. He had only looked at the empty air beside his head and then the items just appeared.
Saralta's letters had said the Great Mage spoke with gods. Yuying had dismissed it. She had stopped believing in gods long ago, around the time when her clan members were deified.
Then she watched James put what could only be blood into Bisera through a needle as though that were an ordinary practice. She had never seen a physician do such a thing, not even in the Dragon Realm. And he had done it on his knees in the dirt, with the humble manner of an ordinary clerk.
Perhaps we are the same kind of people, she thought. For most of her life in Rosagar she had hidden what she was. But a key reason behind that habit was gone now.
She thought, too, of what she had walked in on: her daughter weeping, this man's hand in Saralta's hair—and on his finger, one of the silver rings Saralta had worn in her braids since Rosagar.
An idea began to form in her mind. None of it showed on her face; her eyes stayed on Bisera's breathing.
They worked slowly. Saralta undid the straps while James held Bisera steady, and together they lifted the red-brown plates clear: breastplate and pauldrons first, then, more slowly, the pieces over her injured arm and leg.
Velika worked the left boot off, stiff with dried blood, and pressed two fingers to the top of Bisera's foot, then to the wrist below the bound forearm. She squeezed a nail until it whitened and watched the pink come back, did the same at the other wrist, and ran her palm along thigh and forearm around the bindings.
"Faint, but no fainter than the good side," she said. "Blood's reaching. The flesh is soft. Good."
Removing the mail took all three of them, once Yuying had drawn the mantle clear and moved aside. They did not sit her up. Instead, they rolled her a little towards one side, then the other, working the hauberk up her back a hand's breadth at a time, while James kept his palm over the line each time she moved. Saralta eased the sleeve off the bound forearm first, a link at a time. Velika cradled her head and stopped them whenever a link caught in her hair.
"Keep her low," Velika said. "Lift the head only when the collar's at her ears."
Only then did James raise her head and shoulders. For a moment Bisera rested against him, her head fallen into the curve of his neck, warm and heavy. Her hair smelled of smoke, sweat, and blood.
Then the collar was clear, and he laid her flat again. The sleeve on the line arm came last, eased down over the taped cannula; James unhooked the bag from the tent pole, held it high and fed it through, never letting it drop below her arm, then hung it again.
The arming coat laced down the front. Velika cut away the sleeve on the line arm rather than thread the bag a second time. Then, at last, the coat came free, and she drew a blanket over Bisera, leaving her face and both arms clear.
Beneath the armour, Yuying's bindings were clean. Velika checked each for fresh blood and found none. At the forearm she eased back one edge and brought the lantern closer.
James had stitched enough wounds to know what a cut made that afternoon should look like. This looked nothing like it. The edges had been drawn together into a raw pink seam, with no thread and no scorch of cautery, though the flesh around it was still swollen and purple with bruising.
Velika laid the binding back as carefully as if the seam might tear, then pressed it down without a word. From Velika, that was praise.
"How did you manage to do that?" James asked.
"My family taught me that," Yuying said. "A long time ago."
Velika looked at the bound forearm a moment longer. "If that seam reddens, swells or starts to smell," she said, "we will have to reopen it."
Then came the needles from Seraphina's panel, three of them at three separate sites: the antibiotic deep into the muscle of Bisera's right thigh, the tetanus vaccine into one shoulder, the immune globulin into the other. Whatever had been on that spear point—mud, horse, other men's blood—was sealed inside her now, and she had never been immunised against anything in her life.
Velika rolled the mail and plates together in a saddle blanket, corded the bundle, and set it beside her own pack.
"In my keeping," she said. "Until she fully recovers. Not before."
Then, Velika noticed that the sword was missing.
"Her sword?"
"It fell on the gatehouse when I took her," Yuying said. "I came for her, not for her sword."
"She has carried that sword since she was a girl."
"Then she can retrieve it in the future. Alive."
Velika looked at Yuying for a long moment.
Then she smiled and turned to James.
"You should remember it. She will definitely ask for it when she wakes."
James found his notebook. He wrote in his own language, then read the entry aloud in Vakerian: "Bisera's sword. Left on the gatehouse. Not recovered."
Velika listened and nodded.
They covered Bisera with dry blankets and, over the wool, a silver sheet that crackled whenever anyone touched it and sent Yuying's eyebrows climbing. James found a wool cap among the litter's blankets and drew it down over her hair. Wrapped vessels of warm water went in under her arms and against her chest; Velika slid her palm beneath each to test the skin and moved the one that ran too hot. Last, she tipped Bisera's head back and lifted her chin until the breath came easier.
"Someone stays at her head. Always," she said. "If she retches, roll her onto her good side—line arm out in front, so it stays free—and clear her mouth."
James laid two fingers beneath Bisera's jaw and held them there.
"Stronger," James said at last. "Not strong. Stronger."
"Alive is not well," Velika said. "Nobody in this tent says well until I do."
Nobody did.
"So do we tell the troops," Vesmir asked from his saddle, "that she is alive?"
Velika did not look up from Bisera. "Perhaps not yet."
James stared at her.
"You know what she swore," Velika said, turning to Vesmir.
"Every man in the garrison knows it," Vesmir said. "She swore to His Majesty, on her honour and her life, that Podem would not fall while she still drew breath."
At the word honour, Yuying sighed.
It was a small sound, hardly louder than the brook. James glanced at Saralta. She was looking at her mother the way people looked at an old wound whose story they knew. She said nothing.
"Podem has fallen," Velika said. "And she breathes."
James looked at the faint mist above Bisera's lips. He had told her last night, in the undercroft, what he thought of that kind of honour. It had not changed her mind.
"Serko's rider already left at dusk with a report for His Majesty," Velika went on. "It says what was true at dusk: that she barred the postern herself. It will reach His Majesty before word of this can."
"And he will read it as any ruler would," Vesmir said. "A general who bars the gate behind her last men does not mean to walk out of it."
"Then the next thing he hears is that she lives. Carried out of a city she swore would not fall while she breathed."
"There are men at court who would call it flight before the ink was dry."
"And he would have no answer to them." Velika's voice roughened. "You know how dearly Bisera holds her honour. Better we say nothing until she is ready to defend it herself."
"Then why not simply say that your god, in his grace, saved her?" Yuying said.
Every head turned.
"Call it a miracle," she said, as calmly as if she were suggesting another blanket.
Velika's hand stopped halfway to the sign of the Spirit. Vesmir looked as though she had proposed melting down the altar silver.
Saralta shut her eyes and pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, with the quiet embarrassment of a daughter whose parent had just broken a social taboo.
Then she looked at James.
So, James realised, did everyone else.
"Well," he said. "Seraphina did tell me to have some faith."
Yuying's eyes came to him above the veil, surprised—and for an instant, with a glimmer of distrust. Then it was gone, and her gaze was as steady as before.
Careful with your wording, darling, Seraphina said in his head. Or this becomes you spreading falsehoods. But of course, that is only my opinion.
Saralta lowered her hand. "If Seraphina told you to have faith," she said slowly, "then can we not tell the camp, and His Majesty, that Bisera was saved with the blessing of the Spirit?"
Velika frowned. Vesmir opened his mouth but stopped before any words came out.
"It would not be a lie," Saralta said, turning to them both. "We do not say the Spirit reached down and worked a miracle. We say only that it was done with the Spirit's blessing. Seraphina told the Great Mage to have faith, and Bisera came back to him. The rescue was blessed. That much is certainly true."
Velika looked at Bisera's face for a long moment. Then she nodded.
"That," Vesmir said, "is certainly a wise choice of words."
Velika turned to James. "Ask her, Great Mage. Ask Lady Seraphina whether she will allow it."
James asked her silently.
Oh, that is crafty, Seraphina said, sounding rather delighted. The princess would have made a splendid lawyer. A pause. Very well. I can live with that.
"She says it's all right," James said.
Something passed over Yuying's eyes again. Her gaze tightened as it went from James to her daughter and back. Then it smoothed away.
"Then use Saralta's words," Yuying said.
Velika and Vesmir both turned to her.
"If you keep your general's survival a secret, His Majesty will learn of it sooner or later," Yuying said in a calm and patient voice. "Then he will wonder, or people will remind him to wonder, why he was kept in the dark at first. An initial choice for secrecy makes everything that follows look worse. It would break the trust between your Emperor and your general past mending. Her command would be finished. Or worse. Her survival would no longer be a question of dishonour. It would look like betrayal." She let that settle. "And for every one of us who kept it from him, it might be viewed as, or framed by others as, treason against His Majesty himself."
Velika's face went very still. Vesmir let out a long breath through his nose, like a man watching the road he had meant to take collapse in front of him.
Lèse-majesté, James thought. He had met the word in a dozen histories, usually a page or two before something horrible befalls the accused.
"And the men's spirits are low," Yuying went on. "They have lost a city. The road ahead is long and cold, and they will walk it in horrible conditions. Nothing will keep more of them alive than knowing that the god they serve has not abandoned them."
Vesmir nodded at once, a soldier's nod. Saralta's eyes had narrowed, the way they did when she was trying to understand a complicated order.
"But for that," Yuying said, "my part in it must stay hidden for now. You need not lie. Only leave a little out. Tell them what came of it—that your general survived with the Spirit's blessing—not how." She looked down at Bisera. "Your own Holy Book says as much. Not unto us, O Spirit, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory."
Velika's lips were already moving with the last words. Vesmir made the sign of the Spirit without seeming to notice he had done it.
Saralta stared at her mother.
"Since when," she said in Rosagarian, very quietly, "have you read their book?"
Yuying did not answer.
Something in Yuying's logic felt wrong to James. But he just couldn't place it in words.
Velika and Vesmir certainly seemed convinced. After all, by their understanding of the world, the mere fact that a seemingly delicate woman like Yuying had rescued Bisera from a city surrounded by tens of thousands of Gillyrian troops, then carried her for miles without being caught, was in itself a miracle. And it was certainly a sign of the Spirit's blessing.
"So," Velika said at last. "It is agreed. We tell them she lives, by the blessing of the Spirit, and we say nothing further. Until—"
"Until further notice," Yuying said. "Until the army reaches its intended destination and the general has recovered enough to defend her own position."
"And if General Serko and the other captains ask about the how?" Vesmir said.
Yuying looked at him. It was the look James had seen on Bisera over a map table. It was the look of someone who had already counted the moves.
"They will not ask," she said. "Trust me."
Wow.
James had read about women like Yuying before—royal consorts accustomed to navigating the bewildering politics of the court behind the scenes. But reading about such a woman was quite different from having one standing before him, calmly analysing his predicament.
Velika bent over Bisera again and laid two fingers beneath her jaw.
Then Velika lifted her head. "Why is it so quiet?"
Beyond the linen there should have been voices: the muleteer cursing his straps, someone still asking after a family from the tanners' quarter, Togrul murmuring to the boy. There was only the brook.
"That would be my smoke," Yuying said. "I kept it from this tent and the outer positions. The pickets are awake. Only those within a certain distance of this tent slept."
"Mother." Saralta's hands dropped.
"I will clear what remains. After that it is only sleep, and they will wake tomorrow morning with everyone else."
"There are women and children at those fires," Velika said with restrained frustration. "Men with the cold already in them. And you would have them sleep till morning in this?"
"They will not freeze," Yuying said. "I will bank every fire and cover every sleeper before I come back."
James thought of the boy asleep against Togrul's chest, the bread-sack foot tucked inside the old man's cloak.
From his saddle, Vesmir said, very quietly, "Past every lookout on the ridge, and through every fire in the hollow." He did not finish the thought. Nobody in the tent needed him to: if she had been hostile, none of them would be alive right now.
Then, Yuying went out as quickly and stealthily as she had entered.
Part 2
Much later, when Bisera's breathing had held steady long enough that Velika let the lantern rest, Saralta took her mother by the wrist and led her out of the tent again.
She did not go far: a little way down the brook, away from her riders' fire, where the bare willows leaned over the water and the horses stood between them and the fires. Far enough that no one would hear Rosagarian spoken by a voice they might know.
Her mother let herself be led without question. That was an ominous sign to Saralta.
Under the willows she fastened the cloak properly at her mother's throat. Her mother let her; then Yuying held the edges together like a woman who was cold.
"How did you come?" Saralta said. "So far south. Does Father know about this?"
"He let me," Yuying said.
Something loosened in Saralta's chest. Her father always gave in to her mother's demands. He would always grumble, then send whatever her mother needed and pretend he had intended it all along.
"He sent Alpbek with me," Yuying said. "And told me to bring you home before you married a Vakerian."
Saralta gave a small laugh.
"Saralta," her mother said.
Something in the way Yuying said it stopped Saralta's laugh.
"Your father is dead."
"What? No," Saralta said.
The brook went on over its stones as though nothing had been said. Saralta shook her head, waiting for her mother to correct herself and tell her that it was all a joke.
"No." Quieter this time, as if a quieter word might mean something else.
"The Kangars raided," Yuying said. "He rode out against them himself, as he always did. They set up an ambush for him, and he was dead before the messenger reached us on the road. I went back. But he was already dead."
She said it carefully. Watching her eyes, Saralta understood that her mother must have rehearsed these words to herself many times before saying them here.
"You went back," Saralta repeated. She needed the order of it, though nothing in that order could change the end. She gripped her mother's wrist. "Who was with him? At the end?"
"Your brother Ilbars. He brought your father home across his own saddle. They had buried him before I arrived." A longer pause. "Ilbars says he spoke at the end. Your name, and mine. I do not know whether it is true. Ilbars is kind."
That undid her as nothing else had.
Earlier that night Saralta had wept until there was no breath left in her, for a woman who had been alive all along in the reeds. Now she found she had far more to grieve, and no one could bring her father back.
Yuying held Saralta until she could breathe without struggling. Above the veil, Yuying's eyes stayed dry. They were the eyes of someone holding a floodgate shut with an iron will.
"But couldn't you have saved him?"
The words were out before Saralta knew she meant them.
"If I had reached him while he lived, perhaps." Yuying's breath caught, once. "But I did not reach a wounded man. I came to his grave. Whatever I am capable of, Saralta, I cannot bring the dead back."
Saralta looked at the snow melting on her mother's hand. She had been twelve the night she watched her mother drop a charging aurochs with one foot. She wanted to ask why, with all that power, her mother could not have reached home faster.
Had she held back to keep her secret because Alpbek and his riders were around her?
Then Saralta let the thought go. Her father had died in the field. He had been dead before the messenger was even dispatched.
She loosened her grip.
"Who rules Rosagar now?" she asked instead.
"Timur."
"Timur." She repeated the name as though it belonged to a stranger. "But doesn't Ilbars have more support?"
"Among the warriors, yes. Ilbars wanted revenge, but Timur had the Kangars behind him. He argued that Rosagar, having just suffered a catastrophic defeat, could not risk another confrontation. The Kangars helped him seize power in exchange for tribute." Yuying paused. "Messengers have been sent to His Majesty with the news, and to you. They left before I did, but I travel faster."
Saralta remembered Timur at the archery ground, calling her little sister and daring her to outshoot him. Timur, who had always treated her mother gently, even when his own mother had not.
"So after that, Timur sent you on your way again?"
Yuying held the cloak tighter. "No. He gave me to the Kangar khan as a part of the terms."
"What?" Saralta stared at her. "How could he do that to you? To Father?"
Her cheeks flushed with fury.
"But I am here." Yuying took her daughter's face between her hands, warm despite the bitter cold.
"So did you end up revealing your powers?"
"No, I went willingly," Yuying replied. She said it with such calm that Saralta was completely stunned.
Saralta's mouth opened but nothing came out.
"Alpbek came to me the night the terms were agreed, with two horses saddled, meaning to have me away before dawn, whatever it cost him." Her eyes softened above the veil. "I told him I would not go with him. I told him that your father's legacy was Rosagar, and I was not going to risk causing it to fall into a civil war. I also told Alpbek that I wanted him to grow old with his family around him, rather than die a fugitive and leave his family to suffer Timur's wrath because of me." A breath. "I let him see me cry. He never could bear that. He kissed my hand—in all the years he guarded me, he had never once dared—and he went home."
Saralta could not tell how much of it had been her mother's deliberate performance and how much was genuinely what her mother felt. She suspected her mother no longer could tell either.
"Enough men had died," Yuying said. "Sparing Rosagar any more of it was the last thing I could do for your father."
She paused.
"And the terms gave me the chance to avenge him. And I did, disguising it as a surprise raid on the Kangars by another horde and making it appear that I, too, had been swept away in the fighting. That is why no one must learn of my presence here."
"How did you manage to fool the surviving Kangars?"
"I drove most of them away during the chaos and darkness of the night. And then burnt the camp and all the dead in it."
"So you were in Podem when today's battle started?" It came out as an accusation, because it was one. "How long were you planning to wait—"
"Not tonight." Gently. Immovably. Her thumbs moved beneath Saralta's eyes. "Tonight your friend needs care and your riders need their commander. Ask me everything later. I will answer. Only not here, and not now."
Saralta stood with her mother's hands on her face and her father in the earth. Then, she started sobbing.
At the council where her father had given her the cavalry command, there had been talk of the risk of raids in the west. She had barely listened.
She had been in such a hurry to ride out that she had not said goodbye properly.
Part 3
Inside the tent, James was having a conversation of his own.
Time to go to your house, Seraphina said. The first unit of blood is nearly in, and her pulse has held on it. Now she needs warmth, quiet, and someone watching her who isn't also running an aid post.
Just the two of us?
Three of you, for now. Yuying comes too.
James glanced at the flap.
She closed those wounds, and she closed them dirty. They will have to be opened and washed, and when they are, you will want the woman who knows what she did to them standing beside you. And when morning comes, there will be nowhere for her to hide in this camp.
He agreed with every word. The difficulty was how to say it to Yuying.
He tried it several ways in his head. Come home with me. Come and stay at my place. I'd like you to spend a few nights at my house. Every version sounded like something a man would get slapped for in a bar, and Saralta's mother had carried an armoured warrior for miles without breathing hard. He did not want to find out what her slap felt like.
Saralta came back first. Her face was wet and set. Her mother came behind her, veiled, holding the cloak closed at her throat.
Something had happened by the brook. James did not know what, and it was not his place to ask.
"Seraphina has arranged treatment," he said. "Proper treatment. Not here—at my house. It's warm, it's quiet, and nobody will interrupt it." He made himself go on. "She wanted three of us to go. Bisera, me—" He looked at Yuying. "And you."
Saralta understood the reasoning behind the arrangement immediately. The column would want its escort in the morning, and whoever led her riders on that road would need more than a hasty word in the dark.
"So she wants me to stay behind, then?" Saralta asked.
"For now," James answered nervously.
Yuying turned to look at her daughter.
Then she calmly yet firmly replied:
"No."
"Seraphina says you would be able to provide useful details on how you treated the wounds," James tried.
"Then I will tell you what I did, and you may tell her."
"Also, come first light, this camp will be full of Rosagarian riders. It might not be the best place if you want to hide your presence."
That earned him her attention. "Your patron knows a great deal about me."
"She tends to …"
"And your house. Who else lives in it?"
"No one. I live alone." He heard it as she must have: a strange man, a strange country, an empty house, and a god's word for it. "That sounded better in my head."
Velika made a small cough.
"Saralta wrote to me that the Great Mage speaks with gods." Yuying's tone did not change. "I have known a number of men who spoke with gods. Most of them were mad."
Without looking up, Velika said, "Careful, my lady. She hears everything."
James felt it coming the way he had once felt a crash coming, too late to sell. Don't, he thought. Please don't make it worse than it already is.
Relax, darling. I will just offer a few clarifications.
Good evening, said a voice in Yuying's head. I don't believe we have met.
As a girl she had been taught that a master cultivator could send words across a courtyard into one listener's ear and no other's. She had managed it herself, badly. This was not that. This was inside her head.
She had her back to the linen before she had decided to move. She checked the whole tent before her in one sweep. No one hidden. Nothing gathered. Not a thread of mana in the air but her own.
"Show yourself," Yuying said to the air.
I'd rather not, the voice said. Velika and Vesmir were watching Yuying, not the air. They had heard nothing. But James did.
Most people won't be able to survive my presence. And the tent is crowded enough as it is.
"Is it Lady Seraphina?" Velika asked James.
"Yes."
Velika made the sign of the Spirit.
"So you are the patron deity of the Great Mage," Yuying said.
No, I am not a deity. Though I can do more than most of the gods that your ancestors burnt offerings to. How much I may interfere is another matter.
James put his face in his hands.
For a moment Yuying did not move. Then, slowly, she inclined her head to the empty air: the same small, exact courtesy she had given each of them earlier, adjusted for a higher degree of respect.
"Honoured elder," she said. "I do not know what you are."
Elder, Seraphina repeated, enchanted. It has been centuries since anyone called me that. James, she has manners.
And, to James alone: She isn't wrong, either. You are all babies in my eyes.
"What do you want of me?"
Nothing unreasonable. Bisera needs a warm room and a few days of proper care, and you know what you did to her. It also spares you explaining your situation to a camp full of Rosagarians before they can bear to hear it.
Yuying's eyes went to Saralta, then back to the place in the air where she seemed to have decided the voice lived. "What about my daughter?"
She comes too. Tomorrow, once she has handed over her command successfully. You have my word.
James lifted his head. "She says you come too," he told Saralta. "Tomorrow, once you've handed over your command."
"And when I wish to leave his house?"
You ask, and I bring you back.
"And if you refuse?"
I don't keep birds in cages, darling.
Yuying went very still. James had no idea why.
"That was too easy," she said at last.
Oh, it isn't free. Dear James here is paying for your trip.
Of course I am, James thought.
Still Yuying hesitated. Her gaze found Saralta's, and when Saralta spoke, it was in Rosagarian.
"Go. Don't worry about me."
"Not tonight." Her mother's voice was very quiet. "Not after …"
She did not finish.
"Togrul has stood in Father's hall a hundred times. If you are here at sunrise, he will recognize you. Then they all will." Her gaze dropped to Bisera. "And she needs you more than I do tonight. I can hold a camp. I cannot close a wound."
"I have only just found you," Yuying said.
"I know."
"And now I am leaving you again."
"Only until tomorrow. I will come," Saralta said.
Then, a smile emerged on Saralta's face.
"I have stayed at the Great Mage's house before. You will find it marvelous. Beware of the bed. It is addictive."
For the briefest moment Yuying's eyes went from her daughter to James and back.
Then she turned her gaze fully on James.
"Very well," she told him.
To the air, she added, "Keep her safe until tomorrow."
She will not die tonight, nor tomorrow, Seraphina said. Have some faith.
Yuying looked once more at Saralta. Saralta nodded.
So Yuying agreed. But she looked like someone stepping off a ledge in the dark because her daughter had asked her to.
Then came more work, and James was glad of it.
First, as the panel had promised, the calcium: James flushed the line, pushed it in slowly, flushed again and hung the second unit.
Then he went through it with Velika: the opened supplies and the sealed reserves; what he would go on sending through Seraphina, at her word and on his account; the medicines whose labels Velika could not read, and how to tell them apart by colour and shape. Vesmir had already had his own three injections: antibiotic, tetanus vaccine, immune globulin.
Then James began reminding Velika what to watch for in Vesmir's wound.
"I know the signs," she said.
"I know you do."
"Then stop reminding me." She checked the supplies once more and turned him gently towards the litter. "If she wakes wild and tries to get up, hold her down. And guard the line."
"I'm not sure I'll be strong enough."
"Then hold her down with help." Velika looked at Yuying, and Yuying looked back. An agreement passed between the two women without a word.
"Seraphina says she will contact you herself," James told Saralta, "once the handover's done and your riders have heard that Bisera is alive."
Saralta nodded.
Bisera's armour stayed with Velika.
"Get ready, darlings." This time Seraphina's voice carried to everyone in the tent.
Yuying unclasped Saralta's cloak and put it back round her daughter's shoulders, fastening it at her throat. Then she took up her own mantle and drew it on over the silk.
Saralta's eyes went to the silk, then to her mother.
"Wear something over that in his house," she said in Rosagarian. "It seems to distract him a lot."
"So I have noticed."
"I have sweaters at my place," James said.
Both women turned to him in surprise.
Saralta closed her eyes in embarrassment. She had forgotten that James could understand Rosagarian.
"Sweaters," Yuying repeated, as though learning the name of an unfamiliar weapon. Something moved above the veil that might have been a smile.
"Hold hands," Seraphina said. "Close your eyes. And try not to scream; it upsets the neighbours."
James closed the roller clamp, untied the bag from the tent pole and laid it on Bisera's chest. He held her wrist. Yuying steadied the litter with one hand and took his with the other.
Her grip was perfectly polite.
"Mother," Saralta said.
Yuying looked back. Saralta stayed where her mother could see her until the light blocked them from each other.
James closed his eyes.
When he opened them, the tent was gone.