“Ferkudi,” she said. “Give me your tunic.”

“Huh?”

“Tunic, moron.”

“Why?”

“Because you can walk out of this alley not wearing a tunic, and no one will remember it ten minutes from now.” She stared at him. He didn’t understand. “Versus me walking out of here without a tunic.”

A moment passed. Ferkudi’s face scrunched.

Goss said quietly, “Or her walking out of here with a bloody tunic, Ferkudi.”

“Oh!” Ferkudi said. He loosened his belt and peeled his tunic off.

Teia stripped off her blouse. Battlefield rules, right? She couldn’t even find it in herself to be concerned. ‘Oh no, my squad saw my stomach’? Blood had soaked through her short chemise, too, dammit. It was her favorite of three, the only one that fit just right. She unlaced and stripped that off as well. None of the young men looked. Ferkudi silently held out his tunic, eyes averted. But Teia didn’t take it immediately. She used clean areas of her tunic—most of the back of it—to wipe the obvious smears from herself.

Now she knew another reason why the Blackguard wore black. Hide the blood. Smart, that. She pulled on Ferkudi’s tunic, wrapped her belt loosely around the waist, and grabbed the dead man’s petasos. The young men stood around like rubes, doing nothing. She kicked her bloody clothes at Winsen and said, “Fold those up, nunk. Ferkudi, you drag the body over there, hide it under the rubbish. Goss, kick dirt over the blood pools.”

The young men stood still for one long moment more, still stunned by the dead man at their feet.

“Orholam!” she swore. “Now. Now!”

That snapped them out of it. They moved.

And in two minutes, in staggered turns—different directions, different times—they departed the alley. No one tried to stop them. No one cried out an alarm. It was like it never happened.

Chapter 46

Gavin woke bound and gagged in the back of a wagon, and started laughing. These idiots had no idea—

That he was a Prism.

No more. Well, that left a bad taste in Gavin’s mouth. Or perhaps that was blood and scummy river water. The wagon slipped on a cobble and rattled him. Oh, Orholam, broken ribs.

Didn’t appear to be sticking out at any odd angles, though. So maybe just cracked. And he hadn’t drowned. So there was that. Didn’t think he’d go swimming anytime soon, though. Attack dolphins. What the hell was that? Dolphins were supposed to be nice.

He rolled over slowly, timing his roll with the bumping of the wagon, and was able to see through the side. The sun had risen high above the sole promontory that overlooked the great delta, and it illuminated all the vast farmlands that fed Rath and much of the rest of the Seven Satrapies besides. Looking at the Great River and the farmlands here, Gavin was for the first time appreciative of his handicap. Seen in black and white and gray, the visual cacophony of the city was muted. Gray-and-black buildings rose in front of the dazzlingly white river and farms but for once didn’t overwhelm or detract from that greater beauty.

It had been many years since Gavin had been in Rath during flood season. As a boy from their estate’s walls atop Jaks Hill, he’d marveled at the sheer expanse of water. Indeed, it still awed him. Every year, the Great River flooded so vast an area that maps—maps drawn at the scale of showing all seven satrapies—drawn at different times of year showed a different coastline. Nor was it merely the coast that was altered. As Gavin looked out, it was like looking across an ocean, with villages in the distance sticking out like tiny islands on a sea of glass. This late in flood season, the water was only a few thumbs deep, and all the silt had settled from it. When one talked about the Cerulean Sea being calm in the morning, one understood it was a comparative calm. In the early morning like this, the Great River was so calm as to be surreal.

As an adult who’d been involved in vast efforts, it was the engineering of the thing that awed him. The people who lived on the Great River had not conquered nature; they’d slipped a yoke on it. Every year the great floods came, and the farmers retreated to their little villages, and the rich to their estates. In each case, foundations had been dug deep, deep into that life-giving silt. Entire villages sat only five to six feet above the level of the rest of the ground. The villagers knew exactly how much the river could rise. The floodwaters held no terror for them.

Flood season became a time of relative rest. Marriages were performed, parties held, feats of sport and strength demonstrated, houses repaired, tools sharpened, songs sung, instruments dusted off, love made. And, until Gavin had settled the Blood War, walls fortified, boys and men drilled, and weapons honed for the inevitable raiding that would come some months hence.

But the yoking of the river never really ended. As the waters rose and until the farmers determined exactly how high the river would rise this year, the village elders directed channels to be opened or shut off, managing the speed of the waters’ flow so their own soil didn’t get scoured away. Through flood season, the old men would keep watch over the river as the old women kept watch over the people. As the floods finally began to recede, the elders would direct which channels would be opened in order to drain the waters from their fields slowly, only after depositing all their silt, always trying to strike a balance that would give them the longest growing season possible, and always ready to shore up levees in case of rainstorms.

Their gentle mastery of land and river and labor had meant perpetual bumper crops the likes of which the rest of the satrapies could only envy. And envy they did.

The same flat land that gave them so much food offered little defense. The Great River itself was a defender on only one side. There was too much river and too few people to put a watch on all of it—and that was assuming that no village chief would allow himself to be bribed to turn a blind eye to raiders who promised to wipe out the next village over, where some rival lived or some ancient wrong wanted avenging.

They hadn’t called these the Blood Plains of old for nothing, though that had also been the name of one of the nine kingdoms that had encompassed both what was now Blood Forest and Ruthgar. United, the warriors of the forests and the farmers of the river had been unstoppable. They’d had the first functioning navy in recorded history, with the riches required to build and maintain and staff a true fleet.

And the kings had used that fleet, one even navigating all the way up the Great River to the Floating City, a trip only possible in that time during flood season. It was more impressive for the logistical challenges they had overcome than the military ones. No one at the time had even dreamed of a standing army. The expense of paying farmers not to farm must have seemed an insanity. Everyone knew that raiding was for late summer.

And so when that fleet had reached the Floating City, the defenders had been entirely unprepared. The navy, filled with men who were starving after the arduous trip, which had included numerous portages, and furious at each other, had done unspeakable things when they reached the city. And their commanders, far from trying to restrain the baser passions, had inflamed them instead.

They had done their best to bury what they’d done there, to proclaim only a glorious victory. But a card of that time had survived.

Gavin had never viewed it. He’d seen enough slaughter in his life. Some cards couldn’t be unseen. Sometimes he wondered if that was what his older brother Gavin had done on his thirteenth birthday. Had his father taken him to see cards?