“They’ll die,” Winsen said.

“Make this simple for us, Breaker,” Ben-hadad said. “What do we need to do?”

“I’m certain—and Lady Eirene Malargos needs to know this,” he said, looking over at Verity, “that if we lose Blood Forest, we lose the war. There was one battle already at Ox Ford, and our side lost. Grievously. Ruthgar lost thirty-five thousand men there. That, followed by Raven Rock and the worthless victory at Two Mills Junction? Ruthgar’s sick of taking the brunt of every battle. Sick of sending men to die. I think everyone on our side has written off the Foresters. They’re too far away, and too expensive and too hard to defend. A better line, they think, is the Great River. I think the satrapahs and the Colors will never say this out loud, but they’ll send token forces to make a guerrilla war in the Forest to buy themselves time to build their own defenses, but no one’s going to send tens of thousands of soldiers to die again. In short, the Seven Satrapies have already fallen. They simply don’t have the will to do what needs to be done to win.”

A silence fell over them.

“Worst fight speech, ever,” Winsen said.

“But…” Kip said, grinning suddenly. “We have a few advantages. Inside Tyrea and Atash, there were people who wanted the Color Prince to win. He threw off odious bonds and tore up bad treaties. He freed slaves. He promised wealth and a return to ancestral gods. A certain slice of the people loved him. That’s not true in Blood Forest. The people here care deeply about nature, and they see wights as profoundly unnatural, defying the order of the seasons themselves by which life yields to death. Moreover, the Color Prince lost his temper here. He wiped out whole towns, and let his men ravage and rape others. This is the satrapy just across from the border town where two hundred young women jumped to their deaths off the walls of Raven Rock with their children in their arms. The people here are scattered, but they’re tough and they know the land intimately. They’re hunters and trappers and guides and lumbermen and river captains. In some areas, they’ve never much recognized the Chromeria, but they will recognize someone who comes in and fights a hated invader with them. We gather everyone who’s willing and has something to offer, and we show the Color Prince why it’s called the Blood Forest. Tisis grew up there. She knows the people and their customs. With her help, we’re going to go to the Deep Forest, we’re gonna raise a small army, and we’re going to save the satrapy.”

“In other words,” Big Leo said, “we’re going go fuck up the Color Prince. Like I said.”

Kip punched the big man in his good shoulder. It was like hitting a side of beef. “Exactly. I just had to use more words to explain it for the slow ones.”

“Don’t you guys look at me!” Ferkudi said.

And so, nearly in sight of the capital of Ruthgar, they boarded the odd new skimmer that Ben-hadad had dubbed the Mighty Thruster.

Kip had shaken his head. Tisis had muttered, “Boys.” Ferkudi had guffawed. Winsen had grinned. Cruxer had blushed and said, “You can’t call it that.”

“We’re the Mighty,” Ben-hadad said. “The propulsion units are thrusters, that’s all.” The damn liar.

“I guess you’ll be the first man to ride the Mighty Thruster?” Tisis asked.

His brow wrinkled. “That makes it sound…”

“Make sure you take a good wide stance, legs far apart, or he’ll throw you.”

“He? I didn’t…”

“Do you need more instruction? Because I’m getting quite adept at riding a mighty thruster myself,” she said.

Ben-hadad blanched.

“You’ll want to make sure you have a good grip, and loosen up your hips a—”

“All right! All right!”

Hours later, they sped into the mouth of the Great River—on the good skimmer Blue Falcon.

Chapter 19

“It’s your fault. This war. This madness. All this death and insanity.”

Gavin lifted his head at the sound of the voice, but there was no speaker with him in his cell, no slot open to the outside from which a taunter could hurl word-bolas at him. He closed his eyes again. The silence was a pillow over his face.

Which was odd, considering the hard surfaces reflected back every sound he made. But motionless, barely breathing, seated with his legs crossed, his fingers splayed in the sign of the three in an attitude of prayer, he was habituated to his own little noises. It was only natural that, too long deprived of sensations, he would start hallucinating.

How did you make it so long, brother?

His brother had gone mad down here, but slowly. So slowly. Sixteen years in this monochromatic hell, and for how long had he been sane? Ten years?

Gavin didn’t think he could make it two months.

Odd.

He’d barely moved since Marissia had been taken away. He had control of nothing but his own body.

Seven days. Seven days he’d eaten nothing. In the natural progression of fasting, he hadn’t even been hungry since the wretched third day.

On the seventh day, water had cascaded down the umbilicus above him. First, the rush of soapy water. When Gavin had created this prison, he’d thought it was a measure of his kindness to give such a luxury. Plus, he didn’t know how long a man could live in filth without getting some sort of infection, sickening, and dying. The Prisms’ War had seen plenty of filth, but it had been a war measured in months. Even then, nearly as many men had died of disease as from battle.

But when he’d designed the prison, he’d forgotten about heating the water. A rush of cold, soapy water to a naked man with no means to heat himself was no kindness.

Even my attempt at kindness was cruelty.

But Gavin endured the torrent. He rubbed some water over his wounds, but made no move to clean his beard or skin. He merely sat near the cloaca on the floor and watched as his bread was soaked sodden and sucked away.

The lime, to defend against scurvy, came next. (There were no oranges now, with the loss of Tyrea.) Gavin couldn’t tell, of course, if his father had dyed it blue as he himself always had dyed the oranges he’d sent his brother.

But Gavin didn’t scramble to grab the lime.

The clean water flowed next, rinsing away the soapy water and the lime.

Gavin sat, impassive, his face in his hands.

In the new cleanness of the cell, he could somehow smell afresh his own stench—deliberate, this time—and the slight chalk aroma of blue luxin. He glanced up at his reflection, pinched to inhumanly narrow proportions by the curving of the reflective wall, shimmering slightly with the crystalline facets of so much blue luxin. It looked disgusted with him.