From time to time during this long voyage, I would scan the faces on the deck of the nearest troopmule, looking for my brother, Amiel, so we might wave at one another. I took comfort from this, and I think he took even more. He is no warrior, and this voyage to occupied Gallardia scared him even more than it scared the other green youths, prisoners, and oldsters he shipped with.
I saw him soon after the business with the goblin and the dam.
He wore a good velvet doublet, dove gray and silver, and his ceremonial sword. He had failed the military proofs but, as a duke’s son, was expected to serve in some way. He would be a supernumerary, which means something extra. He would be attached to a wizard, and he would do the tasks his temporary master required.
This was not just any wizard, some starter of small fires or weaver of illusions; one for making love philters, or tattoos that might or might not protect one from minor curses. Fulvir was perhaps the most powerful magicker in the Crownlands, and almost certainly the strongest one openly fighting for us in this war. The goblins would know him, and fear him, and want him dead. My little brother may not have been a fighter, but he was going to war all the same, and I hated it.
I looked more closely at Amiel.
What was he wearing in his hair?
White natal-day ribbons!
I suppose it was the fourth of Highgrass after all.
“Some fucked eighteenth birthday,” I said.
“Whose?” the captain said. “Yours?”
“Well, certainly not yours,” I said back to him, and he laughed in that mad way of fastleaf chewers.
I was not eighteen, though.
I had just turned twenty.
Amiel stood near the prow of his ship, the Lady of Groves, and he scribbled in a writing tablet he was having pains to keep dry in the ocean spray—the seas were still quite rough. I had seen him throwing up for the first days out from Ispanthia, and I had been seasick, too, but only the first day. It is best to be abovedecks for that kind of thing. Today, though, he seemed to be in good form. I worried about him, how could I not?
He was my Chichún.
Well, ours.
We all called him Chickpea because he was the only one of the Duke of Braga’s four children to be born bald. The rest of us had come into the world with thin black hair that soon fell out and grew back thick. But he was mine. I remember struggling to carry him when he was two and I was only four, telling everyone that Chichún was my baby now.
That is the last time I remember wanting one.
Amiel was not just writing, though—he was shouting a poem at the dolphins jumping in the ship’s wake. It was a good poem, about Mithrenor, the god of the sea. Amiel’s long hair was blowing in the wind, making him look quite the romantic figure.
Whose badly fucked idea was it to put such a boy in a war?
And why with the wizard?
I knew that Fulvir, called Fulvir Lightningbinder, had helped to create the war corvids now in the hold below my feet—for this bone-mixing magic, he was also called Fulvir the Father of Abominations. He was rumored to be mad, though those of his country of Molrova all seemed half-mad, with their language of lies. Why must my Amiel be posted with such a man? He could have served our brother Pol, who was a general. It would not have been as good for him to go with our eldest brother, Migaéd, because Migaéd . . . had difficulties.
I had enlisted in an experimental unit, the First Lanza of His Majesty’s Corvid Knights, and we were going to find out how good our birds were at killing goblins. Though we did our best to train it out of them, they had already shown they were good at killing us. Obviously my birds had not yet murdered me, but I had seen a dam killed by her raven—a quick death, it must be said, but difficult to watch if you have not embraced the mysteries of the Bride.
Now I saw a couple of speardams on the Lady of Groves laughing unkindly, watching Amiel at his poetry-shouting. They began to swagger toward the prow of the ship. Clearly they intended mischief, and it seemed to me that women of their age who had not been mustered before must be prisoners.
Knowing how to whistle loudly can be useful, it is something I taught myself to do as a girl. I whistled, and many on that ship looked at me, the bravas with the spears included. I now rolled up my left sleeve to show them the tattoo of the sword wrapped in three flowers. We were perhaps too far away for them to see it clearly, but they knew what it was. They might not have been able to count the flowers, but they recognized the symbol and understood that I had spent some years studying Calar Bajat under a high master of sword. I looked at the speardams in a way to show them I would remember them. Amiel saw me now and waved. I lowered my sleeve and waved back. He then blew me an extravagant kiss, which I returned, though more discreetly. I am not given to fabulous gestures, just what is needed.
The bravas found a better direction to walk in.
Later I would try to remember the poem he shouted at dolphins, but I could not.
“Who is the pup?” Inocenta asked.
You will hear much about Inocenta, she was my best friend, if siblings do not count. Shorter than me, though I am not tall, but stout, and strong of arm and leg. Her ginger hair was what most remembered about her, it is an uncommon color in Ispanthia. I should say, her hair was what you remembered if you never fought her at practice. If you had, you would remember that she moved her axe so fast you had to watch her shoulders to see where it might go, and still you would be wrong; and even if you put your shield in the right place, she’d hit it so hard she’d numb your shield arm to the collarbone. And then of course her next blows came, as fast as clapping. Still, I mostly beat her, though less often than I beat the others. That was in training, though. I would not have wanted to fight her for blood. There was something of the
animal about Inocenta.
“That is my brother,” I said.
“Amiel.”
“Yes.”
“Had to be.”
“Why?”
“Because the other one is a general, and that boy is no more a general than my tits.”
“I have three brothers. And you have no tits, you cut them off.”
“I will cut yours off, too.”
“Maybe if you were faster.”
“I will remind you that you said that when you are picking up your tits. Is your other brother a general too?”
He was a sixt-general. This was not a general who commanded armies, but one who wore a fine suit of armor with no dents in it. This was a general of bordellos and sitting for portraits.
“Not a proper one.”
“What is he, then?”
I considered what to say about Migaéd.
“A luckless gambler,” I said.
Someone on a forward troopmule shouted, “Land, land!”
We were approaching the shores of Gallardia.
Inocenta looked at the horizon we sailed toward.
She said, “So are we all.”
Copyright © 2024 from Christopher Buehlman
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
