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  Sara Brown

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  The rebel army swept into the vilge like a pgue. The sheer volume of their transports was enough to dispce a massive chunk of the river, creating a manmade flood that began to drown the riverside. At the head of the column, Sara first saw common soldiers and supply crates. Then, when the forward scouts had come close enough to the vilge to spot Sara, this common rabble had been jerked away and hidden. They were repced by Warriors of every size and variety, their breastptes polished to a blinding sheen, helmets bedecked in feathers of every color, weapons held in parade-ground salutes. Each Warrior wore enchanted armor, and almost all of them wielded bcksteel bdes. Assuming they’d truly been fighting in a civil war for years upon years, they alone likely represented more military might than King Sporatos had ever brought to bear on Tulian, save for the archmages. Sara was sure the barges held some of them, too, tucked further within the seemingly endless parade of barges. It was an army with more people, more combatants, than the entirety of Tulian’s popution.

  With fifteen soldiers on her left, fifteen on her right, Sara stood with her hands on her waist, watching them approach.

  Evie had picked her troops well, unsurprisingly. They watched the slow crawl of this force with the same ambivalent air they regarded nearly every threat. They stood straight and formal, but leaned on their muskets when they thought they could get away with it, whispering out of the corner of their mouths when Evie was too far to hear.

  Mui’s squad tried their best to replicate that. She could tell they thought that the Tulian soldiers were either insane or suicidal, but they still had enough self-respect to try and adopt the same casual air.

  It didn’t work.

  They shifted from foot to foot, twisting in pce as if to stretch out their muscles, but only ever stretching so that they were facing the vilge or the jungle, an avenue of escape. Even Mui was struggling to keep his tail out from between his legs, the rebellious limb constantly twitching downwards, betraying his real thoughts every few seconds.

  As they were technically in charge of escorting Sara to his people, he’d ordered his squad to take a protective wedge in front of her. As if he really thought he was capable of protecting her. He couldn’t quite sell the act, but he had least had the balls to try.

  She wondered if Mui’s squad would think so highly of her soldiers if he knew they weren’t being brave; they simply didn’t see anything to be afraid of. They knew that this was an unwinnable fight, and they knew they had Sara with them. If it was a fight they had a chance of winning, a fight that she might actually start, they’d be nervous. As it was, they were certain she was going to find a peaceful way out of it. So far as they were concerned, there was literally nothing to worry about. If anything, they were looking forward to having someone else around to deal with any jungle monsters.

  She wished she was as confident in herself as they were.

  When the first row of barges reached a half-mile’s distance, Sara saw six shapes leap into the sky, emerging from much farther down the river, hidden behind the jungle canopy. The dark shape’s leaps reached an apex of some fifty feet or so, then they widened, wings snapping open. Their form resolved into that of something white and brown as their wings began to beat faster and faster, growing rger as they reached their stride.

  At this, the Tulian soldiers finally began to shift in pce, muttering to one another.

  “Silence in the line!” Evie barked.

  “What’re those?” Sara asked Mui, casual as could be.

  “Griffons, ma’am,” the catfolk replied, quiet, as if the army could already hear him. “Griffons and their riders. The scouts of the true army. I am surprised we did not see them sooner; they must not take to the sky as early in the day as I have heard our own do.”

  “Your taskforce didn’t have any.”

  “We were not important enough for them, ma’am.”

  Sara watched the griffons approach with no small amount of curiosity. Her dad had wanted to join her on this trip south. As she watched the beasts approach, she wondered how long she could get away with not telling him about them. He was going to be pissed he missed this.

  “Hey, Evie, use my telescope and watch how they fly. We’ll use the colr so you can describe it for dad, ter. Try and get some estimates on their size, speed, stuff like that. He’s gonna shit himself when he hears about this.”

  “Certainly,” Evie replied, pulling the enchanted Carrion telescope from their bag and putting it to her eye. “I expect you will be getting a closer look yourself, however. They are all flying this way.”

  Sure enough, the griffons didn’t split up in the slightest. Maybe Mui knew them as scouts, but that didn’t seem to be their mission for today. They spread into a V formation, its tip pointed directly towards the vilge.

  “How far away do you think they started from?” Sara asked.

  “Perhaps a mile?” Evie twisted the spygss as she tracked the griffons. “It is difficult to judge range when all the world is covered in endless greenery.”

  It took less than a minute for the griffons to reach the vilge, dipping one wing as they began to circle overhead. Only a few hundred feet above her by then, she could see them far better. Each creature carried two riders on their back, a strange saddle nestled between their pumping wings. She had no idea how the thing stayed on; it had no visible straps to secure it in pce. She also wondered how smart the animals were. They all had their heads cocked, one rge eye staring at the pier she stood on. Almost as if they were staring directly at Sara.

  Suddenly, without any visible signal, their wings folded.

  The griffons began a ruinous plummet towards the ground, accelerating to a blur in an instant. She heard muffled screams from the vilgers that had been hidden within their homes, and even some of her own soldiers muttered something foul, taking a step back.

  The griffons extended their legs at the very st instant before they struck, six heavy thuds crashing to the soil like meteors. A cloud of dust was thrown outward from the impact site, washing over Sara and the others, only stopping at the far side of the river.

  The griffons were massive. She didn’t know how big she’d expected them to be, but now that they were on the ground, she could tell that they were easily the rgest living creature Sara had ever been in the presence of. When they unfolded their wings to shake the dust free, she guessed they spread fifty feet from wingtip to wingtip. Each of their talons were long enough to pierce Sara’s chest straight through, and for those that remained standing on all four limbs, Evie wouldn’t have needed to duck in order to walk beneath them. Without the wings, she would have compared them in size to elephants. With them, she was at a loss.

  Despite their size, the griffons struck her as remarkably graceful. She didn’t know much about the griffons of fiction and folklore back on earth, and her scattered recollection of the fanciful creatures didn’t quite fit the reality. She mostly remembered drawings of some macabre amalgamation, a frankenstein mixture of eagle and lion haphazardly stitched together. These animals weren’t that. Yes, they had features that resembled both animals, but that comparison struck her as almost coincidental. Convergent evolution, her dad would have called it. Each one was a uniform color, covered from beak to tail in white, gray, or brown feathers, with only their leonine tail covered by something more like fur. Their bodies were lithe and streamlined, but bulged outward into heaps of rippling muscle in two pces: where the wings met the back, and where their rear legs molded into the torso. Looking at those hind limbs, it was easy to see how the things were capable of leaping fifty feet straight into the air; she only wondered what kind of damn boat could survive such a unch more than once. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see the griffons pulp stone beneath their cws.

  Her appreciation of the griffon’s anatomy was cut short as their riders finally dismounted. Most simply leapt to the ground, nding with easy familiarity, but one griffon bent into a low crouch, tilting itself to one side.

  A lone woman disembarked, using a walking cane to guide herself out of the saddle. The griffon’s other rider, the one that had been sitting in front, watched the woman disembark with the anxious energy of someone who clearly wanted to offer a helping hand, yet knew it would get nothing but spped if they did.

  The woman completed her dismount without falling, but only because she did so at a gcial, cautious pace. Sara watched all the while, hands crossed over her chest.

  The dy was clearly in charge. Every other rider had turned to watch her, and even the griffons had arranged themselves in a rough circle around the one that had carried her. She wore armor as extravagant and finely crafted as Sara had come to expect from the Imperials, though it didn’t seem to be fit for battle. She eschewed boots or greaves, so her legs were only protected from the knee up, and there was no helmet in sight.

  But her chestpte was at least something Sara could respect. The other Imperial ‘Warrior’ she had met, Suy-Ty, had worn something like those old greek armors of earth, with a molded rendition of masculine abs and pecs. This dy’s armor had clearly been smithed in the same style, abs and all, but it didn’t pretend to be made for a man. She had a set of great honking tits carved into that chestpte, and the craftmanship was so fine that Sara suspected it was accurate right down to the nipple.

  As she approached, still leaning on her cane, Sara was surprised to see the woman’s age. She was a human woman who walked like she was in her te eighties, yet couldn’t have been closer halfway through her thirties. Her cheeks were smooth and unwrinkled, accentuated by judiciously applied puffs of rosy blush, and the soft skin of her legs and arms didn’t at all fit the trembling, aching manner in which they carried her. Either she’d just been recently wounded, so recently she hadn’t had an opportunity to see a healer, or something else was going on.

  Whatever it was, it didn’t affect her voice.

  “Hail!” She cried, throwing her hands wide. She was a skilled orator, easily casting her booming voice across the entire vilge. “Hail, Chosen of the Gods! Chosen of the highest and lowest of Emotion’s Pantheon! Chosen of Sorrow, Love, and Rage! Hail the Avatar of Reason, She who shall Recall all who have been Forgotten! Hail! To your Divinity we bow!”

  The woman bent low at the waist, lower and lower, until she had to use her walking stick to keep herself from toppling over, facing nothing but her own feet. The only way she could have further supplicated herself to Sara was to throw herself to her knees, forehead pressed into the mud. Every single other rider bent just as low, mirroring their leader’s posture. Even the griffons dipped their heads in respect, though only, Sara noted, after the griffon which had carried the woman began to do so, and the animals did not bow nearly so low.

  After a respectful pause of all holding this posture, perhaps ten seconds or so, the woman straightened, calling out once more.

  “And greetings, Sara Brown, Governess of Tulian! To your station, I offer my hand in fond welcome!”

  She began thumping forward, a politician’s not-quite-smile on her face. The griffon riders began tending to their animals, leaving the woman to approach alone. Whatever that little ceremony had been, it was apparently over.

  Sara took a deep breath, closing her eyes.

  Deep in her mind, hidden beneath yer after yer of divine meddling, Sara clicked her Blessings on. She liked to imagine the sound of an old computer whirring to life, fans flinging dust as it begrudgingly roused itself to work once more.

  She opened her eyes.

  And saw everything.

  Her soldiers. Mui’s squad. The griffon riders. Hell, every single man, woman and child in the vilge? She saw them all. She knew everything about them. She was looking down on them from every angle, as if she’d surrounded them all with a thousand-thousand pairs of eyes, her endless senses counting their every breath, feeling the beats of their heart like her own, hearing the little pops of spittle shifting deep in the flesh of their throat, as clearly and easily as if her ear was pressed to the skin. They were less than naked before her; they were Seen, known in a form more complete than their closest, most intimate lover would ever know. Sara didn’t just notice which way someone was looking. She tracked every micrometer twitch of the muscles which ringed their pupils as they dited open and closed, she was counting how long their upper eyelid touched their lower on each blink, and she knew to the millisecond how long they had focused their vision on their current point of interest. She knew everything there was to be known about the people living in this moment, and all of that knowledge, every infinitesimal detail, would never, ever leave her. She would remember it with the exact same crity until the day she died.

  Champions of battle were supposed to be invincible in war.

  Sara was something else.

  She was what resulted when an omnipotent, omniscient being set out to create a mortal mind that could glimpse a sliver of pure, perfect truth. A creature which could bance the course of Kings and Kingdoms like water on the razor edge of a knife, always knowing which way the drop would fall when it reached the tip.

  But Sara wouldn’t have really been Sara if she let all that bullshit tell her what to do.

  “Yeah, that’s me! The one in the middle. And who’re you?”

  “I am Warrior-General Kuhn-Drah, Third in the True Adjutant’s Armies, Fifth in the Line of Succession to their most Holy Title,” the woman said as she continued her slow approach to the pier. Sara didn’t so much as twitch towards meeting her halfway.

  “And what’re you doing all the way out here?” Sara asked. “This vilge’s pretty nice, has some good food, but I don’t think they’ve got a hotel big enough to fit your party bus back there.”

  “Sara…” Evie whispered in warning, clutching at her belt.

  “We travel to the city of Tony, to save its people from being forbidden the Emperor’s grace.”

  “By conquering it, I’m guessing?”

  “If they see fit to resist, our hand will sadly be forced.”

  “I got bad news about that,” Sara drawled. Kuhn-Drah reached the edge of the pier, pausing to take slow, borious steps up the short set of stairs. She had to hide a grimace of pain after every step. “If you’re bringing an army to get a city on your side,” Sara told her, “You’re not likely to be taking the peaceful way out.”

  “Such are the times we live in, Chosen,” Kuhn-Drah replied, slightly out of breath. She reached the top of the stairs, and now only twenty feet separated them. Sara stared at her, dead-eyed, as the crippled woman took slow, pained steps forward. “Would that you had seen our Empire as it should be. But I suppose the Gods do not oft gift their Chosen to times of peace, do they?”

  Kuhn-Drah came to a halt at the line of soldiers separating her from Sara, clearly expecting them to step aside. When they didn’t, her eyes swept across them, ultimately falling on Mui’s shoulder pauldron, where the humble yellow flower of a Sergeant’s rank was drawn. Her lips drew into a tight scowl.

  “I only hope that your view of history has not been tainted by the words of simple men who do not know better. If you wish, it would be a simple matter for my army to–”

  “The men and women of Sergeant Mui Thom’s Squadron are my duly appointed diplomatic escorts, acting in official service to the Tulian people, and any harassment of them, their belongings, or their freedoms will be treated as a breach of Tulian sovereignty,” Sara snapped. She took her first step forward, raising a finger. “Furthermore, if you so much as goddamn imply that you or anyone in your Empire is going to y a hand on these people, I will personally consider it an act of fucking war.”

  Kuhn-Drah recoiled as if spped, rage fshing across her features for the briefest of moments, only to be carefully, professionally smoothed away. It was the first shred of honesty Sara had seen out of the woman.

  “You are much as I was led to believe,” she eventually said, one she could summon up the gracious demeanor she’d been affecting thus far.

  “So you do know a little bit about me, then. Empire’s not as isoted as we thought, huh?” Sara gauged the woman’s reactions as she spoke, picking and prodding with a surgeon’s grace. “I’m guessing that’s why you specifically addressed all the obscene bowing and shit to my divine origins, but saved the normal greeting for me as a person. I get it. You knew I’d fucking hate it, but you had to do it, for some reason. So this was probably the only way you could keep me from walking out of this talk without committing career suicide, right?”

  “Correct,” Kuhn-Drah nodded, the kindness slowly fading from her words, repced by something more practical. She’d introduced herself as a general first, heir to the Adjutant second, after all. “If I didn’t have an audience, I would have walked up and shaken your hand and been done with it. But welcoming a Chosen requires certain rituals. Things that not even I can ignore.”

  Sara raised an eyebrow. “Most people make a big deal out of meeting me, but they don’t send the six-griffon-squad over just to show off how good they can sniff their own toes.”

  “It has been twelve hundred years since the Empire st saw a Chosen, Sara Brown. Some traditions grow more x with age, others more strict. As the closest of mortalkind to godhood, the Chosen are pced highly in our scriptures.”

  Unfortunately for Kuhn-Drah, the fact that the ceremony was seen as so necessary that even the fifth in line to the Adjutant couldn’t ignore it? That told Sara a whole lot. Mainly that there were people in the woman’s Empire who were routinely treated like that, and even more importantly than that, it told her that there were people in her Empire who would get pissed if they didn’t get treated like that.

  Sara took deep, calming breaths. It was her first sure sign of the absolute depravity that she knew would be awaiting her in this Empire, and it had already sent her blood boiling. But she couldn’t just fly into a rage right off the bat. After a slow count of ten, she opened her eyes.

  “Well, I guess you walked that tightrope as best you could.”

  Kuhn-Drah frowned. “I will not apologize for behaving as I ought, though I will say that I wish I could have greeted you in the manner you prefer. I only hope that you have been in our world too long to still be surprised by the sometimes arduous traditions of nobility.”

  “Not surprised, not anymore. Just disgusted.” Sara tapped her heel, mulling things over. “You said you’re third in the army, fifth in the line of succession. You’re a hotshot, but you’re not capable of actually negotiating any deal with me on your own, are you?”

  Kuhn-Draw nodded. “It is within my rights to draft treaties and charters, but only the Adjutant may approve their final terms.”

  “Yet when you found out I’d be meeting with someone in Tony, you swung this entire army further north, stuffing it on the river you knew I’d probably be taking, all in the incredibly faint hope of catching me before I talked to your enemies.”

  Of course, all of that had been an educated guess on Sara’s part. But she said it with the confidence of absolute fact, and accordingly, Kuhn-Drah didn’t bother to lie.

  “Yes. Though you are not the only reason I took a more northern course. Our armies grow rger with every passing year. They are more difficult to coordinate, more difficult to move from pce to pce, and as you can see for yourself, soon even the rivers will not be able to guide their might. The empty northern fields were expected to become an important avenue of travel, allowing an army to emerge from the jungle, travel east or west for hundreds of miles at an unprecedented rate, then delve back into civilization wherever they so chose. It has taken years of debate within our military’s factions to finally accept this strategy.” Kuhn-Drah took a deep, irritated breath. “Now that we know a Champion is ciming these nds, it seems so much of what I fought for must shift.”

  Huh, Sara thought, flicking her eyes over the woman. Actually telling the truth, there. Willingly letting me know she was a part of the faction that wanted to move through Tulian, and that she put a great deal of effort into it, only to say she’s now abandoned her victory. So… she’s attempting to establish trust and civility, proving she’s willing to compromise and adapt to new circumstances.

  “That’s a great story,” Sara said with a deliberately childish roll of her eyes, “but we both know you’re not actually trying to negotiate passage through our nds. If you wanted to march through, you could, and you know there’s not much we could do to stop you. Hell, you probably think we’d barely care. It’s not like southern Tulian is a poputed area anymore. Your other army buddies were happy enough to start a giant battle in our territory, after all. It was only once you learned about our guns that you suddenly started giving a shit about what we thought.” Sara’s eyes narrowed. “You want those weapons. You want them bad. As many as we can sell you, and then as many lessons on how to make them as you can get. If marching through our borders didn’t jeopardize that possibility, you wouldn’t think twice about it.”

  “I have been in the field for far too long to know the more intimate details of the court,” Kuhn-Drah said, a sentence that meant almost nothing, “so I can speak only to the more pressing concerns of my army’s navigation. And while yes, our military might indeed far exceed yours, these firearms lend you an ability to resist and harass beyond your numbers. It would be a true fool of a General who refused an opportunity to pull a thorn from their side and pce it in the enemy’s.”

  “So you’re not just trying to get us to sell you guns, you’re trying to get us to go shooting up anyone who isn’t you that marches through our territory?”

  “I only cim that an agreement of trade could provide fertile soil for the flowering of a more stalwart alliance.”

  “I’m not going to spend Tulian lives attacking someone I have no reason to fight.”

  “But if two armies cross your nd, one welcomed, the other not, would it not weaken your cims of sovereignty if you would let the trespasser go unmolested?”

  “You’ve said it yourself. Southern Tulian is all but abandoned. The only real cim we have comes from maps drawn by a dead Kingdom and a few scattered vilges. Someday we’ll have the strength to assert ourselves across our entire border, but not yet. If this is going to turn into an actual negotiation, you’re gonna have to take treating Tulian citizens like attack dogs off the board.”

  Sara gnced at the approaching army. They were only a few hundred yards away now, and she’d begun to hear the sounds of barges bumping against one other.

  “So what’s this going to be? You going to try and negotiate what you can here and now, all on your own, or are you going to wait for someone with more authority to create something firmer?”

  The young woman barely paused to think about it. “I think it best for us to begin a fruitful discussion here and now, of course. For the first time in two hundred and fifty years, I believe this war may be approaching a state in which it can finally be won. The arrival of a Chosen such as yourself can only herald better times.”

  “Alright. Go get whatever you need ready. I’m going to go discuss some things with my wife.”

  “Of course,” Kuhn-Drah said, nodding her head. “I expect this will be a productive evening indeed.”

  Doubt it’s gonna be a whole damn day, Sara thought, gncing at the sun. It couldn’t be ter than nine in the morning.

  While Kuhn-Drah’s walking stick beat out her careful, sedate pace off of the pier, Sara turned to Evie, a frown on both their lips.

  “How much of that could you catch?”

  “Most everything important, I believe, save a few words here or there. It is a nguage easier to understand than to speak.”

  “Good.”

  Sara watched the army slowly creep towards the vilge. To no one’s surprise, Kuhn-Drah began softly murmuring into a crystal as she left. Sara had no doubt that there had been an entire room full of advisors listening to the whole conversation, all of whom would now want to get their piece in.

  Kuhn-Draw ignored them, focusing all her effort reying orders for how the meeting pce should be prepared. Sara had considered dictating that to her as a power py, but decided against it. They’d both taken each other’s measure, now. She wanted to see how much the politician-general had gleaned.

  Instead of discussing things with Evie right away, Sara stayed silent, watching the sluggish army drag itself forward. She could already hear indistinct rumbling of conversation, but things would really change once they were in shouting distance.

  To Sara’s surprise, her quiet contemption was interrupted by, of all things, a vilger. As the griffons began taking to the sky one-by-one, a lone human man braved the wing-beaten windstorm, burying his eyes in the crook of his elbow to hide from the dust.

  He managed to stumble up onto the pier just as the st of the griffons finished taking off. Blinking the tears out of his eyes, he called out as he found Sara.

  “Will they be taking the vilge?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Yeah, probably. Unless you got some way to stop them.”

  “Yes, yes,” the man said, stepping between her guards without concern to stare up into her face. “We all know they’ll win the vilge. But my question is if they will be taking it.”

  Sara caught his implication this time. Taking. Taking what they wanted.

  Theft.

  Sughter.

  Rape.

  The hallmarks of war.

  An ecstasy of mindless violence, long-stressed soldiers whipped into a frenzy by the mere sight of the helpless. It was no secret to Sara that for the soldiers of this world, this inevitability was half the reason they joined an army. It was what the Knights of Sporatos had begun to unleash in Tulian before Evie had restored order, and it was what had happened to thousands upon thousands of forgotten vilges over the centuries. If a soldier was particurly lucky, or at least among the first to start the rampage, sacking a single city might earn them more than a year’s wages in stolen goods. They had every motivation to indulge, and there would be no punishment for those who did so. It was simply the way of things. The natural consequences of war.

  This vilge didn’t have much in the way of raw wealth. Just food, which the army likely had in spades.

  What it did have was men, women, and children.

  Sara knew that if things got out of control, those few that survived would never truly recover.

  “Evie,” Sara snapped, stepping back.

  “Of course, Master.” The diminutive feline woman jumped up on a crate, rapier fshing as she whistled for the attention of the troops. They leapt away from Sara without a second thought, abandoning their protective circle to form ranks underneath their commander.

  Evie took a deep breath. Flicked her eyes across the vilge, making calcutions. And then began to speak.

  “All soldiers are to fulfill the following orders independently. Two soldiers to a home, with each household allotted two minutes to gather as many valuables as possible, after which they will either leave voluntarily or be dragged away. You will gather every vilger in a location with enough room for all civilians present to maintain line-of-sight on all others. Children are to be in the center, kept hidden beneath bnkets and clothes, given alcohol to sedate them if possible. Form a defensive perimeter around the resulting congregation as best you are able, bayonets fixed. Lend your sideswords to any in the vilge who cim to have combat experience and use them as a secondary line. Distribute whatever daggers you have to any who are physically capable of wielding them, but instruct them to keep them hidden. Do not let any civilian leave your protection, not under any circumstances, even if their homes begin to burn. If any one of them is foolish enough to sneak away, you will leave them to their fate. Sara, repeat these instructions in Kemari.”

  Sara began rattling off a pitch-perfect transtion of Evie’s words, addressing Mui’s squad of six even as the Tulian soldiers bolted. The man who had came to ask after her didn’t offer a weepy, sobbing thanks. He was an old man, an old farmer. He simply nodded at her, then drew a long carving knife from his boot and joined the soldiers as they began smming their fists on every door they passed, shouting orders in broken Kemari.

  Evie hopped down from the crate, dismissing her rapier. “Do you truly expect General Kuhn-Drah will allow such a thing to come to pass in your presence?”

  “Do you think she could stop it, if it actually starts?”

  Evie and Sara were alone on the pier, now. Evie’s tail was twitching something fierce, anxiety wracking her. She hated Sara being so exposed.

  But she would have hated Sara wading into battle against a hundred thousand foes even more. And if the pilging began, that would be an inevitability.

  “...are they close enough yet, Master?” Evie asked. Her ears were straining forward, towards the army.

  “Almost,” Sara murmured.

  Sara’s Blessings of Amarat were many. Some were obvious, like her ability to track the eyes and facial expression of anyone in a room, but others weren’t quite so cut-and-dry. In particur, it was her Blessing that let her hear all parts of a conversation perfectly, committing it to memory, that had the widest reach.

  It was a helpful little Skill, obviously. But what some people didn’t realize about conversations, at least when they happened in the open air, was that they didn’t just include the people chatting. When you had a conversation in public, whether you knew it or not, you were sharing that conversation with anyone in earshot. And those people, whether or not they chose to join that conversation, were talking about their own things, in earshot of another group, maybe just a little bit farther away, who could be heard by others yet still, on and on and on, again and again and again. It was how rumors in a city could spread faster than any runner or town crier could hope to equal. If people packed the streets of a city dense enough, the entire road network was just one long, looping chain of conversations.

  Since she’d developed the ability, Sara had only ever been in Tulian, where rge swathes of the city were nearly abandoned. There the chain broke easily, stopping and starting fitfully as the crowds mingled and broke apart. It was still incredibly helpful, of course, because she didn’t just hear these conversations. She understood them. Every word was tagged and catalogued in her mind, filed away forever more. Knowing that Ven the Tanner was cheating on his wife with both neighbors on either side of his house, and had been miraculously maintaining that clusterfuck of an affair for nigh on a year now, was as easy to recall for Sara as the fact that apples were red and the sky was blue. The second she heard it, it became ingrained, intuitive knowledge.

  That was how she rooted out spies, how she could tell Vesta exactly what the markets were doing at any given moment, how she could drop in on a meeting between bcksmiths intending to rig the price of nails, and hell, it was how she’d been giving the tax collectors a list of names to audit, always ciming they’d been pulled from a random pile. It was, without a doubt, the Blessing which most divorced her from what a human should be capable of, what turned her into something alien, and that was only when it was used in Tulian, a city of ten thousand squatting in a half-empty city.

  And up ahead, a hundred thousand soldiers were crammed shoulder to shoulder, barge to barge. And they had nothing better to do than talk.

  She heard one word. One single word, from one woman making a crass joke to one other woman sitting nearby, and that was all it took.

  It was like lightning cracking through her skull.

  Electric arcs danced and jumped across the army, each fork carried by each spoken word further and further away, dragging Sara’s awareness with it. The deluge smmed into her skull in a manner that should have been indistinguishable from deafening white noise, much less something comprehensible, yet she didn’t even blink as it began.

  This was why she’d wanted to wait to negotiate with Kuhn-Drah. This was why she’d graciously sent the General off to go ‘prepare a meeting,’ as if Sara gave a single solitary shit how or where they sat while they talked.

  In the first five seconds of the leading barge’s arrival, she’d tallied over a million spoken words, and the rate at which she heard more was only growing with every passing moment, as more and more people caught sight of the vilge, caught wind of the fact that there was a Chosen waiting there for them.

  “The army has one hundred and forty-three-thousand members, of which around forty thousand are non-combatants,” Sara told Evie, beginning the litany of facts that she knew her wife’s military training would devour like cake. “Steel weaponry is universal, but steel armor is not, and the ratio of conscript to volunteer favors conscription much more heavily. Can’t be too sure of that, though, because the only people talking about conscription are the ones saying it’s turning out to be worth it to see a Chosen in-person. General discontent is also higher, despite the fact that the st battle they participated in was months ago. Seems Mui’s Empire is much more popur with its constituents.”

  “A poor assumption to make at this stage, Master. His force was pruned for those eager enough to go on a months-long journey north. This would also likely take them well away from major supply centers, which would necessitate their provisioning of newer and thus better-maintained equipment. You also only heard them te in the night after they had won a battle, when only the most celebratory members of their force would have remained awake.”

  “Fair point. Want to get out your pen? It’s been twenty seconds. I know everything.” Sara’s eyes widened. “Wait. Hold on. Shit, really?”

  Evie gnced up, armed. “What is the matter?”

  “There’s a couple dozen couples arguing about fucking,” Sara said, grabbing Evie’s arm in excitement. “And some of the straight ones are arguing about whether or not it’s ‘worth the risk’ to do more than anal.” Sara threw her head back, ughing. “Holy shit, Evie! Evie, we’re rich! Tulian’s economy is fucking solved.”

  “I don’t follow, Master.”

  “Herbs, Evie. They don’t have contraceptive herbs like we do! No one’s even talking about them, which means they don’t know about them. If they fuck au naturel, they’re risking pregnancy.”

  Evie’s pen, half-raised to her notes, halted.

  “That’s horrifying,” she whispered, probably with more sincerity than almost anyone else would treat the matter. “Master, are you certain?”

  “As I can be. I mean, you should hear some of them! I mean- oh god, no, c’mon man, don’t pull your pants down after she said that! Shit, c’mon, Tun, you heard her tell him that. Go save his ass. She’s clearly trying to baby trap him. If you’re his sergeant, you gotta at least keep him–”

  “Master,” Evie repeated, more insistently.

  Sara shook her head, trying to ignore the absolutely terrible life decision about to occur. At least the dude sounded like he was enjoying it.

  “Sorry, sorry. But yeah, no herbs. They’ve got condoms, but only the kind made of animal intestines.”

  “Revolting.”

  “I mean, you might be saying otherwise if you didn’t love it so much when I leave you leaking. But still, yeah, I’m certain. You’ve gotta get Vesta on that. I don’t know how fast we can up our production of those, but tell her to throw everything at it. I don’t care how much it costs; we’ll make it back on the first fucking weekend.”

  “I’ll make it a priority as soon as the meeting is over, Master.” She gnced up from her notebook, sadly shaking her head. “For their own sake. Now, enemy composition?”

  Sara started drumming out number after number, telling Evie everything there was to be known about the Imperial force. General Kuhn-Drah didn’t have half as good an idea of her own capabilities as Sara’s twenty seconds of eavesdropping gave her, and every passing second gave her new insights. She knew their daily supply requirements, the morale of every unit from brigade to squad level, their ammunition stocks, and an endless list of other helpful minutia.

  About the only thing she couldn’t figure out, ironically, was the big-picture stuff. Some people were chatting about the war in general, sure, and some of them were even discussing how it started and how it had gone over the st two-hundred-odd years, but in this case, quantity did not equal quality. Every cim had a countercim, every bit of news was argued and batted back and forth until it was torn to unrecognizable tatters. This wasn’t an educated popuce. Half of them believed everything they were told, and the other half didn’t believe anything they’d heard in their entire lives. And with most of the actual elite nobility traveling in tented-off barges of their own, she wasn’t privy to their discussions, would have surely been more enlightening, even if incredibly biased. She’d have to do her own, actual research sometime ter.

  After ten minutes of bathing in the endless roar of information, new, actually useful tidbits fell to a trickle. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of conversations were completely mundane, after all. Soldiers were far more interested in pying cards and jockeying for better sleeping spots than they were discussing deep, philosophical facets of their own Empire. Occasionally Sara would pick up an interesting little something here or there, but that was it. Nothing she even bothered telling Evie about.

  By the time Kuhn-Drah came back, it had been two hours. She set up a tent in one of the vilge’s drier portions and, after seeing Sara’s troops protecting the vilgers, ordered her lower-ranking Warriors to form a cordon around the entire vilge, barring the common soldiers from entry. A nice gesture, one Sara was gd to have, but it didn’t mean much when the woman hadn’t thought of it herself. If Sara hadn’t been protecting the vilgers, Kuhn-Drah would have let them burn.

  And burn they would have. Sara could hear the soldiers on the barges calling out their frustrations, climbing on top of one another’s shoulders to try and get a better view of the vilge. Furious that they’d been denied their ‘fun’, especially after having traded many favors to be pced up at the head of the barge convoy, they turned instead to regaling others with the tales of their past horrors.

  How egalitarian, Sara thought, resisting the urge to vomit as she heard yet another woman describing the men and boys she’d broken. Some part of her, some vain, outdated self, had hoped that the old earthly ideal of women being somehow inherently less aggressive than men was true. It was a sexist idea, outdated, and not at all supported by modern research, but Sara had still clung to the idea that fifty percent of the popution was born just a touch gentler. It had been a comforting thought, imagining that there would always be a spark of kindness, no matter how low humanity sunk.

  That naivety was dead and gone. The difference in strength between a career soldier and a civilian was that of an adult and toddler, and given strength and authority, raised in a society that had spent two hundred years at war and uded the acts, the women of the Empire had proved themselves just as capable of horrific, monstrous depravity.

  Sara tried to block it from her mind, to forget it, even though she knew she never could. She focused on the meeting with Kuhn-Drah as best she could.

  It was a very, very different meeting from their first. Before, Sara had been feeling her opponent out, testing at what they knew and what they wanted from her. Kuhn-Drah had been adept enough through that round, when they were almost on equal footing.

  After Sara absorbed an army’s worth of intel, the General wasn’t even a pyer.

  She walked out of the meeting with a stack of papers gently scribed by Evie’s fountain pen. It listed everything– and Sara meant everything– the Empire would be willing to give up for a supply of guns, cannons, and the knowledge of how to construct more. She’d left them nothing; she’d taken every st inch of sck Kuhn-Drah and her advisors had to give, and the General didn’t even know it. If Sara had asked for one iron ingot more, the deal would have fallen through, yet the woman had walked away convinced she’d brokered a good, solid deal.

  “Thirty-five thousand tons of raw iron ore yearly for five years,” Evie recited, scanning her way down the paper, “five years of service from two hundred mages for the purposes of constructing domestic mines, including ten divination experts to locate untapped resources fields, ten thousand yearly tons of raw copper, zinc, sulfur, lead, bauxite, and assorted other minerals. A myriad of other, smaller shipments of ore and expertise, including automatic admission to any and all Imperial Mage Universities for any students of the Chosen’s choosing– and that’s emphasized, meaning your specific endorsement, not Tulian’s– so long as the prospective student is familiar with the Kemari nguage. One initial payment of one hundred tons of gold bullion, with a second hundred tons paid upon receipt of the one thousandth cannon. This is all, of course, in addition to the political decrations from the Adjutant that any act of aggression against Tulian will be considered to have been taken with the intention for the aggressor to use Tulian as a staging ground for a future attack upon the Empire, which, while not quite an assurance of Tulian independence, is close to it.”

  Evie looked up from the sheet, blinking her eyes in the darkness. It was very, very te, and she was tired.

  After shaking down an entire Empire for all they had, Sara felt as alive as she’d ever been.

  “Yeah, that about covers it.”

  “Sara,” Evie whispered, leaning close as they headed to the torch-lit circle of protected civilians, “how can we not accept this? Tulian will nearly rival Sporatos in wealth overnight, but it will be spread amongst a hundred thousand citizens, not millions.”

  “I’ll tell you how we might not accept it,” Sara said as they passed between the torches, giving their soldiers a nod. “We sp it down on the other Adjutant’s desk and ask him what he can offer that beats it.”

  “I cannot fathom anything capable…”

  “They’ll have to get creative,” Sara said with a shrug. “Mui seems like a nice guy, so I hope they manage.”

  “But are you really okay with this? With giving away the secrets of our weapons?”

  “You mean giving away smoothbore muskets and bronze cannons?” Sara snorted. “Yeah. I’m perfectly fine with it.”

  “I know you have other weapons you intend to create, but they will take time–”

  “And we’ll have that time. Even if these guns win every battle at the first shot, their Empire’s so rge, so congested, that it’ll probably be another ten years before it’s all wrapped up. By then we’ll have an even bigger advantage in firepower than we do right now.”

  Evie blinked her disbelief, tail curling around Sara’s hips.

  “I know that you are the Champion of Amarat, but this is…”

  “It’s literally what I’m supposed to do here.” Sara took the sheaf of papers out of Evie’s hands. “This is what I was supposed to be doing from the minute I arrived in this world, but instead I got all caught up in a bunch of other bullshit.” She shook the papers for emphasis. “This? This is what I’m best at. I’m better at this than fighting, I’m better at this than anything-”

  “I know, but-”

  “-Hell, I’m better at it than I am at fucking.”

  “Don’t lie to your wife,” Evie immediately snipped.

  Sara threw her head back, ughing into the cool night air.

  “Alright, alright! Fine. Maybe I’m better at that. Had a hell of a lot more practice, anyway. But still. What did you expect?”

  “I didn’t expect them to… to sign away their economy to you, and to do it while looking smug.”

  “Yeah, well, they got got. It’s not like it’s a final deal, anyway. It’s not going to stay this good. Even if we went with their deal, we’ve still got weeks of negotiation, travel, all kinds of bullshit I really don’t want to screw with, but I’ll have to anyway. For now, though, we just have to see if the other true Adjutant can cough up something better. Whatever happens, we come out ahead.”

  “I can only hope you’re right, and that I do not awake from this dream as soon as my head hits the pillow this evening.”

  “Yeah, well, I can think of a few things that’ll prove you’re awake,” Sara purred, wrapping an arm around Evie’s shoulder. They were in the middle of the vilgers, now, which was the only reason her hand was merely crawling down her wife’s shirt instead of her pants.

  “Here? Now?”

  Sara let her grin slip away, repced by a stern, authoritarian gre.

  “Are you questioning me?”

  “N-no,” Evie muttered, a powerful shiver running through her. Her head fell down, chin tucked into her neck, while her hands came together, folding themselves primly in front of her waist.

  “Well,” Sara leaned close to Evie’s ear, whispering directly into it, making the feline appendage flutter just so adorably while she sent one hand tapping its way down Evie’s ribcage, heading for the crook of her legs with each word. “You… probably… should’ve been, because I’m so fucking tired.”

  And with that, Sara dropped face first onto an empty bed roll, finally letting the complete, utter exhaustion she’d been hiding consume her. The st thing she heard before fully passing out was a quiet, muttered hiss of frustration.

  “If she does that again, I swear to the gods, I’m going to-”

  Sara drifted away, still chuckling.