“Sometimes justice solves nothing at all,” she said. “And vengeance solves even less. Have you heard how Sharleyan addressed your brother’s subjects after one of them attempted to assassinate her on her very throne?”
“No.” Irys shook her head, her folded hands tightening on one another. She hadn’t learned of that assassination attempt until after she’d reached Destiny, and a part of her dreaded the way that experience must have hardened Sharleyan Ahrmahk’s hatred for the princedom of her birth.
“I wasn’t there myself,” Mairah said, “but the clerks took down a transcript of every one of her sessions sitting in judgment … including that one. She’d just pardoned four convicted traitors, and when she looked at the body of the man who’d tried to kill her, she said, ‘Surely God weeps to see such violence loosed among His children.’ And then she said, ‘Despite anything the Group of Four may say, God does not call us to exult in the blood and agony of our enemies!’”
“She did?” Irys’ eyes widened, and Mairah nodded.
“She did. And she meant it. Empress Sharleyan is a good hater, Your Highness, but it’s hard to make her hate in the first place. If that’s what you truly want, then you harm someone she loves or victimize the weak, but I doubt you’ll enjoy the experience in the end. She hated your father because he’d hurt someone she loved and because—much as I realize you loved him—he victimized a great many people weaker than he was. But she hated him, and because of what he’d done, not you or your brother, and she isn’t one to visit vengeance upon someone’s children or family. Neither is Emperor Cayleb—if for no other reason because neither of them would stoop so low as to take vengeance upon an innocent for someone else’s crime. But it goes deeper than that, as well, especially with Sharleyan.”
“Why?” Irys asked simply, and Mairah smiled sadly.
“Because you and she are so much alike. Because she lost her father early, and she knows the pain that brings. Because she knows who was truly behind his murder, and who planned your brother’s murder, as well, and she is a good hater when it comes to the viciousness of a man who could kill a little boy out of cold, calculating ambition. Because people have tried to murder Cayleb, the man she loves, and she’s seen the cost of that, as well. And because people’ve tried to murder her, not just once, but four times—twice in the last five years, plus the two assassination attempts her Guard defeated before she was fifteen years old. Your Highness, her own uncle tried to have her murdered—or, at least, aided those who wanted her dead, whether that was his own intention or not—and the only reason I’m alive, most probably, is because her uncle was also my cousin’s friend and he ‘arranged‘ the riding accident that left me with a broken leg when Sharleyan made her trip to Saint Agtha’s. But the stories you may’ve heard about Saint Agtha’s—the stories about how she picked up her dead armsmen’s muskets and killed at least a dozen of the assassins herself … they’re true, Your Highness. She knows what you’ve felt about your father, and she knows how terrified you’ve been, how desperate to protect your brother. She’s felt those things herself, and I promise you this—no matter what may lie between the House of Daykyn and the House of Tayt or the House of Ahrmahk, my Empress will never allow harm to come to you or to Daivyn. If the need were to arise, she would pick up a musket—or a rock, if that was the only weapon she could find—and defend both of you just as she and her armsmen defended one another at Saint Agtha’s. She couldn’t do anything else and still be who she is.”
Irys gazed at her, tasting the iron certainty in her words. Lady Hanth might be mistaken; she wasn’t lying, and Irys smiled a bit tremulously as she reached up to cover the hand on her shoulder with her own palm. She started to say something, but then she stopped, gave her head a little shake, and inhaled deeply. She squeezed the older woman’s hand, and then turned back to gaze at the passing fortress once more.
“I wonder if Daivyn’s finished pestering Lieutenant Aplyn-Ahrmahk out of all patience yet?” she said instead.
.III.
Brahdwyn’s Folly, Green Cove Trace, Glacierheart Province, Republic of Siddarmark
“Damn it’s cold!”
Sailys Trahskhat cupped his hands and breathed into them as if he actually thought he could warm them through his thick gloves. Byrk Raimahn looked at him quizzically across the fire, and Trahskhat grimaced.
“Sorry about that, Sir. Guess it was pretty obvious without my saying, wasn’t it?”
“I believe you could probably say that, yes,” Raimahn agreed.
They were three days into the month of April and, technically, the season had tipped over from winter into spring ten days ago, but “spring” was a purely notional concept in northern Siddarmark, and especially among the high peaks of the Gray Wall Mountains, at the best of times. This winter had been particularly harsh, and the locals assured them they still had at least three or four more five-days of cold and ice before the thaw set in. He believed them. It was hard not to, given that at the moment the temperature was well below zero on the Fahrenheit scale Eric Langhorne had reinstituted here on Safehold.
That would have been more than cold enough for a couple of Charisian boys, even without the cutting wind; with the wind, it was as close an approximation to hell as he ever hoped to see. He remembered how cold he’d thought Siddar City was in the winter, and found himself longing for that balmy climate as that Glacierheart wind sang hungrily about him. He shivered, despite his thick, putatively warm parka and lifted the battered tin teapot out of its nest of embers. He poured himself a cup, cradling it in his own gloved palms, holding it so the steam could provide at least a momentary illusion of warmth to his face and cheeks. Then he sipped and tried not to grimace. Calling such an anemic brew “tea” was a gross libel, but at least it was hot, and that was something he told himself as it glowed its way down his throat into his hollow belly.
He wouldn’t feel so frozen if he didn’t also feel so constantly hungry. Unfortunately, even with the food Archbishop Zhasyn had brought with them, there was nowhere near enough to go around. Half of the relief expedition’s draft animals had already been slaughtered for the precious protein they represented, and it was unlikely the others were going to survive more than another couple of five-days.
If that long, he told himself grimly with another sip of the hot water masquerading as tea. Welcome to “spring,” Byrk. I wonder how many of the ones who’ve made it this far are going to starve before the snow melts?
He and Sailys were a long, long way from home, and he turned away from the fire to contemplate the Gray Walls’ frozen, merciless beauty. There were mountains in Charis as well, of course. Some of them even had snow on their summits year-round, despite the climate. But Charisian mountains also had green, furry flanks, with trees that tended to stay that way year-round and snow that stayed decently on the highest peaks, where it belonged. These mountains were far less civilized, with steep, sheer sides carved out of vertical faces of stone and earth, thrusting raw, rocky heads above the tree line to look down on narrow valleys lashed by snow and wind. Beautiful, yes, and indomitable, but without the sense of warmth and life Charisian mountains radiated. Not in winter, at least. People had lived here in Glacierheart for centuries before anyone really tried to explore Charis’ mountains, yet these valleys, precipices, and peaks had a primal, unsubdued ferocity that laughed at the notion humanity might ever tame them. He felt … out of place among them, and he knew Sailys felt the same.
He gazed out over the long, narrow valley known as the Green Cove Trace and hoped none of his sentries were going to lose fingers or toes—or noses—to frostbite this time. Or, for that matter, that none of them had become as numbed in mind and alertness as they no doubt felt in body. None of them had the opportunity for a fire like this one, not where the smoke might be seen, and he tried not to feel guilty about that.
The Trace faded into the blueness of mountain morning shadows as it snaked its way north towards Hildermoss Province, and if their information
was as accurate as usual, there were men headed down that valley at this very moment. Men who were just as grim of purpose—and just as filled with hate—as Byrk Raimahn’s men.
He lowered his gaze to the charred ruins of Brahdwyn’s Folly and understood that hatred entirely too well. The blackened timbers and cracked foundations of what had once been a prosperous, if not overly large, mountain town thrust up out of the snowdrifts, like tombstones for all the people who’d died here. Died in the original attack and fire, or died of starvation and privation afterward. The actual graves were hidden beneath the snow, overflowing the modest, rocky cemetery surrounding the equally charred ruins of the town’s church. Brahdwyn’s Folly’s priest and a dozen members of his congregation had been locked inside that church before it was fired, and as he looked out across the wreckage, Raimahn wondered how that barbarity had become so routine that it seemed almost inevitable.
“You reckon they’re still coming, Sir?” Trahskhat asked after a moment, and Raimahn shrugged. He still wasn’t certain how he’d become the commander of a double-strength company of riflemen, but there wasn’t much question about how the solid, reliable Trahskhat had become his second in command.
Trakskhat’s loyalty to the Church of God Awaiting, his faith in the vicarate as the archangels’ stewards on earth, had carried him into exile in a foreign land where he and his family were insulted and harassed on a daily basis by bigots who hated all Charisians, regardless of their faith. It also had reduced the star third baseman of the Tellesberg Krakens to the harsh labor, meager salary, and penury of a longshoreman on Siddar City’s waterfront, and he’d accepted that—accepted all of it—because the faith which had made him a Temple Loyalist had required it of him. Because he’d been unable to accept the schism splintering God’s Church, despite the tolerance and legal protection the Crown and Church of Charis had guaranteed to the Empire’s Temple Loyalists. His stubborn integrity and his belief in God had left him no other choice but to turn his back upon his native land and live in exile from all he and his family had ever known.
Until the “Sword of Schueler.” Until he’d seen the rapes, the murders, the atrocities committed in Siddar City by mobs harangued, armed, and all too often led by men in the vestments of Mother Church’s Inquisition. His own family had been swept up in that carnage, his children threatened with murder, his wife with rape, as well. He’d fought back, then, and as the mob closed in on their fleeing families, he and Raimahn had resigned themselves to death in the frail hope that by standing to die in the streets of Siddarmark’s burning capital they might buy the people they loved the time to reach safety. And the two of them—and their families—had been saved from that mob only by the arrival of armed Charisians led by a Siddarmark-born Reformist.
A lot of attitudes had gotten … clarified that day, including those of Byrk Raimahn and his grandfather. That was why Claitahn and Sahmantha Raimahn had taken Sailys’ family under their protection in Siddar City and promised to get them safely back to Charis as soon as they could find room aboard ship for all of them. It was also why Sailys Trahskhat was no longer a Temple Loyalist, and for someone with his integrity, the outcome of that change had been inevitable.
“No reason to think they’re not coming, Sailys,” Raimahn replied after another sip of so-called tea, and shrugged. “The information we fed Fyrmahn should’ve been convincing, and he’s a determined son-of-a-bitch. Don’t forget the Trace is the only real way through the Gray Walls east of Hanymar. If they’re coming through from Hildermoss, this is where they have to do it. Then there’s Father Gharth’s report that he’s been reinforced. The Father’s sources could be wrong, but I don’t think they are, and if he has been reinforced, he has more mouths to feed.” The young man smiled bleakly. “I’m pretty sure that last raid of Wahlys’ will’ve pissed him off enough–and hurt him enough—to send him straight at a prize like this one. If he’s smart enough to see the hook he could still pass it up, but given his track record?” He shook his head. “I don’t see him doing that, Sailys. I really don’t.”
Trahskhat nodded and glanced up the valley himself. His eyes were harder than Raimahn’s, and his expression was as bleak as the mountains around them.
“Can’t say that disappoints me, Sir,” he said, those stony eyes dropping to the ruins of Brahdwyn’s Folly. “Can’t say that disappoints me at all.”
Raimahn nodded, although he wasn’t really certain he shared the older man’s feelings about that. Or that he wanted to share them, at any rate.
He’d seen more than enough of Zhan Fyrmahn’s handiwork to know the man would have to be high on anyone’s list of people the world would be better off without. He wouldn’t be quite at the top—that spot was reserved for Zhaspahr Clyntahn—but he couldn’t have been more than a half-dozen names down. It had been Fyrmahn’s band, along with that of his cousin, Mahrak Lohgyn, who’d burned Brahdwyn’s Folly and butchered its inhabitants. Ostensibly, because they’d all been Reformists, hateful in the eyes of God, and there’d actually been three or four families in town of whom that was probably true. But Zhan Fyrmahn had had reasons of his own, even before the Grand Inquisitor’s agents had stoked the Republic’s maelstrom, and there was a reason he’d taken such special care to exterminate Wahlys Mahkhom’s family.
Mountaineers tended to be as hard and self-reliant as the rocky slopes that bred them. From everything Raimahn had seen so far, Glacierheart’s coal miners took that tendency to extremes, but the trappers and hunters like Mahkhom and Fyrmahn were harder still. They had to be, given their solitary pursuits, the long hours they spent alone in the wilderness, with no one to look out for them or go for help if something went wrong. They asked nothing of anyone, they paid their own debts, and they met whatever came their way on their own two feet, unflinchingly. Raimahn had to respect that, yet that hardness had its darker side, as well, for it left them disinclined towards forgiving their enemies, whatever the Archangel Bédard or the Writ might say on the subject. Too many of them were feudists at heart, ready to pursue a quarrel to the bittermost end, however many generations it took and despite anything Mother Church might say about the virtues of compassion and forgiveness.
Raimahn had no idea what had actually started the bad blood between the Mahkhom and Fyrmahn clans. On balance, he was inclined to believe the survivors of Brahdwyn’s Folly, that the first casualty had been Wahlys’ grandfather and that the “accident” which had befallen him had been no accident at all. He was willing to admit he was prejudiced in Mahkhom’s favor, however, and no doubt the Fyrmahns remembered it very differently. And whatever had started the savage hatred, there’d been enough incidents up and down the Green Cove Trace since to provide either side with plenty of pretexts for seeking “justice” in the other family’s blood.
That was Zhan Fyrmahn’s view, at any rate, and he’d seized on the exhortations of the inquisitors who’d organized the Sword of Schueler as a chance—a license—to settle the quarrel once and for all. If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else; there was always something haters could appeal to, something bigots could use. But when the hate and bigotry came from men who wore the vestments of the Inquisition, they carried the imprimatur of Mother Church herself. It wasn’t simply “all right” for someone like Fyrmahn to give himself up to the service of hate and anger, it was his duty, the thing God expected him to do. And if two or three hundred people in a remote village died along the way, why, that was God’s will, too, and it served the bastards right.
Especially if their last name happened to be Mahkhom.
I wonder how many times Fyrmahn’s reflected on the consequences of his own actions? Raimahn had wondered that more than once, and not about Fyrmahn alone. Does he realize he turned every survivor of Brahdwyn’s Folly into a dyed-in-the-wool Reformist, whatever they were before? If he does, does he care? And does he even realize he and the men like him are the ones who started all of this? Or does he blame Wahlys for all of it?
He proba
bly did blame Mahkhom, and his only regret was probably the fact that Wahlys hadn’t been home when he and his raiders massacred Brahdwyn’s Folly. It would have worked out so much better from Fyrmahn’s perspective, especially since it would have prevented Mahkhom from becoming the center of the Reformist resistance in this ice-girt chunk of frozen hell. Raimahn had no idea if Mahkhom had truly embraced the Reformist cause, or if, like Fyrmahn himself, it was simply what empowered and sanctified his own savagery and violence. He hoped it was more than simple hatred, because under that icy shell of hate and loss, he sensed a good and decent man, one who deserved better than to give his own soul to Shan-wei because of the atrocities he was willing to wreak under the pretext of doing God’s will. But whatever the depth of his belief, whatever truly drove Wahlys Mahkhom, by this time every Temple Loyalist within fifty miles must curse his name each night before lying down to sleep.
Archbishop Zhasyn’s right; we do lay up our own harvests the instant we put the seed into the ground. And I can’t blame Wahlys for the way he feels, even if I do see the hatred setting deeper and deeper into these mountains’ bones with every raid, every body. It doesn’t matter anymore who shed the first blood, burned the first barn, and how in God’s name is even someone like Archbishop Zhasyn going to heal those wounds? For that matter, who’s going to be left alive to be healed?
Byrk Raimahn had no answers to those questions, and he wished he did, because deep inside, he knew he was more like Wahlys Mahkhom—and possibly even Zhan Fyrmahn—then he wanted to admit. That was why he was out here in this ice and snow, sipping this watery tea, waiting—hoping—for the men he wanted to kill to come to him. Men he could kill without qualm or hesitation because they deserved to die. Because in avenging what had happened to Brahdwyn’s Folly he could also avenge the arson and the rape and the torture and the murder he’d seen at Sailys Trahskhat’s side in Siddar City’s Charisian Quarter the day the Temple Loyalists drove the Sword of Schueler into the Republic’s back. Perhaps he couldn’t track down those Temple Loyalists, but he could track down their brothers in blood here in Glacierheart.