But a leader can get away with only so many nonsense orders before his men doubt his judgment, and that was poison.

And the unintended consequences piled up.

Having forbidden the rape of the slaves only made them more appealing as wives. One man somehow got permission to marry a slave wife four separate times. No one was sure what happened to the first three; Kip suspected murder but couldn’t prove it. Kip had the man gelded and relieved of his hands, then notched and sold.

Kip was revered. It made him uncomfortable. It was a fool’s gold. It wasn’t real. It was an image they projected onto him. But some images are more helpful than others. They still saw how young he was, some of them.

Kip couldn’t let himself be revered as some kind of holy child. Children could be fooled. Those who were too coarse to understand how love and obedience can be paired needed to learn fear.

So Kip had reinstituted the old tradition of the Year of Jubilee. It had been subverted before by the Ilytians and thence in the rest of the satrapies, but it was at least an established principle—it had a history—and the good or ill of it all came down to enforcement.

If one is to barter against human nature, one might as well make the best deal one can. The Year of Jubilee came every seven years, at which time slaves were freed.

They’d found a mention of which year it had last been celebrated and from there decreed that the tradition had lapsed rather than been broken. Thus, a slave-wife taken now would be freed five years hence on Sun Day. As a free woman on that day, she would be free to divorce her husband then. Any children she bore would be hers to take with her, and the husband would be liable to give her one-tenth of what he made in a year or a goat, whichever was more.

‘This is the best I can do?’ Kip had asked Tisis.

‘During a war, when passions are hot?’ she’d said. ‘This is better than I thought you’d get.’

His idealism had also meant his army got a fraction of what they might have for selling the slaves. Each slave’s contract now stipulated they would be in servitude for only five years. Every trader used that fact to bring the price down, though Kip knew that none of them intended to free the slaves in five years. He couldn’t free the slaves immediately lest they take up arms against him again; he couldn’t keep the slaves himself; but the slaves he sold would be slaves forever—unless Kip lived, and unless he won, and unless he was around in five years with enough power to enforce his will.

How did I become a slave trader?

And why was he so idealistic, when Jubilee had been tried and had failed before?

It wasn’t just that Kip had grown up in Rekton, where they had no slaves and the institution didn’t seem to fit naturally with all the people under Orholam’s being equal. It was more than that. Every slave woman he looked at reminded him of his mother: bereft, cast off, disgraced, despised, vulnerable to abuse and thereby somehow a lodestone to those who would abuse her. Her saw her in every enslaved woman’s face.

I couldn’t help you, mother. I couldn’t heal you. But maybe I can keep these women from being hurt as much as they would be.

Tallach snorted, and Kip realized they hadn’t seen Lorcan yet, though signs of his passage through the Blood Robe camp were evident in the destruction everywhere. Doubtless Conn Arthur wanted to see if his brother still lived.

Kip dismissed Tallach. He and Cruxer got down into the mud and blood to do more work. There was always more.

“Ferkudi,” Kip said, seeing a child weeping amid the bodies. Tisis had not yet arrived with the healers. “Use your brain for me, would—Dear Orholam! What happened to you?!”

“What?” Ferkudi asked as Kip and the rest of the Mighty turned to him. Blood was streaming down the back of his head. He touched his neck and brought back the fingers wet and red. “Oh, I thought I was just real sweaty.”

He patted the top of his head with no apparent alarm, then tipped it toward Kip.

“Bullet graze me?” he asked.

There was a new furrow across almost the entire top of his head, crossing the other scar, drawing a line almost from ear to ear.

“Sweet Orholam, man, how flat is the top of your head?” Big Leo asked.

“Flatter now,” Winsen said.

“Thanks for telling me,” Ferkudi complained. “Now it’s starting to sting. It didn’t sting before you told me.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have stuck your dirty fingers in it,” Ben-hadad said. “Don’t you know anything?”

“What’re the odds it knocked any sense into him?” Winsen asked.

“Ben, you take him in a moment and get him some help, but first, Ferk, I got a job for you,” Kip said.

“Sure, sure, ouch,” Ferkudi said, still poking at his scalp.

“How much would it cost one widow to house and feed… eh, ten orphans?”

“Ages?” Ferkudi said. “Teenaged boys eat more and what not.”

“Come up with an average. With housing included.”

“More than ten children per house would make it cheaper per child,” Ferkudi said.

“Efficiency isn’t the point,” Kip said.

“Well, then, wouldn’t one or two children per widow be better?”

“Fine, efficiency is part of the point.” Kip stopped speaking as he saw the gate opening to the city. “What is that? Anyway, figure it out, Ferk. And talk to Verity and tell her we’re feeding these kids tonight and until I say otherwise. She’ll complain. But they’re kids. Now what’s this at the gate? I need you Ghosts for another five minutes before you extricate. And someone go find my sword and Cruxer’s spear. We had to throw them down to mum the panic back there.”

“Love that spear,” Cruxer said.

It was best to get the will-casters out of the night mares as quickly as possible, but there were armed men facing off at the gate.

Kip jogged over there. It wasn’t the most majestic entrance he’d ever made: one unarmed man on foot surrounded by drafters mounted on great elk and weird horses.

But the city’s forces weren’t terribly impressive, either. The conn was mounted on an emaciated stallion that looked exhausted just holding him on its back. No one else was mounted, but they did have weapons, and there were several hundred of them from what Kip could see.

Kip’s men, despite not having any orders, hadn’t let the conn or his people through.