1
THE SUMMER SUN HAD RIPENED THE BERRIES IN THE HEDGEROWS of the Order of the Golden Sphere, dyeing them a rich ruddy purple. The juices, a red more brilliant than even the best scarlet silk, stained my fingers as I plucked them from the deep brambles. Within several yards in any direction, novices of the order filled baskets of their own. A wheat-haired girl with pale honey eyes had a smear of berry-red across the front of her pale gray gown. She sighed and adjusted her starched white veil, leaving another red streak.
I stifled a laugh, then sobered. A war waged some hundreds of miles south of us, the sisters of the Golden Sphere were deep in study at the art of casting charms under my tutelage, Sastra-set Alba was making final arrangements for an alliance-cementing voyage to Fen.
And I was picking berries.
I snagged my thumb on a large, curved thorn; nature made needles as effective as any I had used in my atelier, and the point produced a bead of blood almost instantly. I drew my hand carefully away and wrapped the tiny wound in my apron, letting the red stain sink into the linen.
Picking berries. As though that were an acceptable way to spend my afternoon, now of all times. I flicked the corner of the apron away with a frustrated sigh. My basket was already nearly full, but the bushes were still thick with purple. I knew what Alba would say—winter cared little for our war, and all the members of the community fortified the larder against that enemy. I wanted to rebel against that pragmatic logic. The ordered calm of the convent mocked me, the pristine birchwood and the gardens all carrying on an unconcerned life and inviting me to join in.
It infuriated me. Probably, I acknowledged as I resumed plucking fruit for the basket, because the pacific quiet was so inviting. Here I could almost forget—had forgotten, in horrifying, brief instants—that my country was at war. That my friends in the city could be killed under bombardment, that Theodor and my brother in the south could be overrun on the battlefield.
Letters were painfully delayed, coming weeks after they were sent, if at all, as the Royalist navy poached ships off the coast and the overland routes remained treacherous. I had learned to cope by pretending that nothing happened between receipt of one letter and the next, that the events Theodor and Kristos described unfolded in the instant I read them. The possibilities that a single day could bring—a crushing defeat, mass desertion, my brother captured, Theodor killed—overwhelmed me if I allowed myself to think about them.
Which was especially difficult when the last letter had come weeks ago, sent weeks before that. Kristos wrote to both Alba and me, carefully penning his letter to avoid betraying any vital specifics should it come into the wrong hands. Still, the message was clear. Volunteers—mostly untrained agrarian workers and fishermen—gathered in Hazelwhite, and Sianh had to prepare them for future large-scale battles while engaging in skirmishes with the Royalists still holding territory in the south. The ragtag army made up of both radical Red Caps and moderate Reformists had coalesced effectively enough to take several small fortifications, but I sensed from the letter that these were positions the Royalists were willing to give up.
The real battles remained at a hazy distance in the future, just soon enough that the thought of them left a swirl of nausea in my stomach and a sour taste in my mouth. I wanted, desperately, to do something, but teaching the “light-touched” sisters of the convent how to manipulate charm magic was plodding, redundant work, removed from the immediacy of the war for Galitha.
The novice with the berry-stained veil motioned me over. Many of the novices took temporary vows of silence, and though it was not required, there were some sisters who maintained the vow for life, on the premise that silence made communion with the Creator’s ever-present spirit easier. Despite long hours of silence, on account of having no one to speak with here, I was no closer to any such communion.
I dropped the last few berries from the hedge into my basket and joined her. I raised an eyebrow and pointed to her veil; she flushed pink as she noticed the stain, and pointed toward the narrow road that carved a furrow through the forest.
Still too far away to see through the trees, travelers announced themselves with the rattle of wheels. She looked to me with baleful curiosity, as though I might know anything. As though I might be able to tell her in the stilted, limited Kvys I had picked up in the past weeks if I did. The other sisters along the hedgerow noted the sound and gave it little heed, turning back to their berries as though the outside world didn’t exist.
To them, perhaps, it didn’t.
Alba crested the little rise behind the convent and strode toward me. Her pale linen gown, a more traditional Kvys design than she had worn in West Serafe, more traditional even than most of the sisters, floated behind her on a light breeze. The yoke was decorated with symbols of the Order of the Golden Sphere embroidered in blackwork, circles and crosshatches and thin dotted lines I now understood to be references to charm magic.
The berry-stained novice bowed her head, as did the other sisters, to a Sastra-set, but Alba wasn’t looking for them. “The hyvtha is gathering,” she said, using the Kvys word that usually referred to a band of threshers at harvest or a troupe of musicians. “Let’s see if anyone has made any progress since yesterday, shall we?”
“Don’t tell me we’re disappointing you,” I said, deadpan. Trying to teach adults who had been suppressing any inclination toward casting since they were children was nearly impossible. Of our hyvtha of eighteen women and two men from the order’s brother monastery, only ten reliably saw the light, three could maintain enough focus to hold on to it, and one had managed a shaky, crude clay tablet. Tantia was proud of her accomplishment but had yet to repeat it.
Alba expected a battalion of casters capable of the exquisitely fine work in the order’s basilica, and I had one caster who struggled with work a trained Pellian girl could churn out at eight.
The travelers appeared on the road, a comfortable carriage drawn by a pair of gray Kvys draft horses. “And those are the Fenians.”
“Which Fenians?” I asked, craning my neck as though I could see past the lead glass windows in the carriage.
“The foundry owner. Well, his son who handles his negotiations, at any rate.” Her smile sparkled. “Your cannons are forthcoming.”
“So we’ll go to Fen—when?”
“I’m still working on the shipyard, and I’ve two mill owners on the string, each trying to underbid the other for the fabric.” She grinned—she enjoyed this game of gold and ink. It made me feel ill, betting with money that wasn’t mine. My business had been built carefully, brick by precisely planned brick, and these negotiations with Fen felt like a house of cards, ready to topple under the breath of a single wrong word.
More, anxiety gnawed at the periphery of everything I thought, said, or did, fueled by the persistent fear that the war might be lost before I could even properly contribute. That I could lose everything, including everyone I loved, for want of quick, decisive action. Alba didn’t seem motivated to act quickly as I did, and there was nothing I could do to prod her from her insistence on the time-consuming propriety of negotiations.
I bit back the argument I’d made many times, haste before all else, as she continued. “Given the meeting with the Fenians, then, I will not be joining the hyvtha this afternoon. See if Tantia can explain her methods to the others.”