I didn’t see Sianh cut down the piper and the caster, because I had my head between my knees, charm magic sparking bright around my buzzing eyes.
“What happened?” Theodor demanded. “Are you—” He searched my face, lines of worry furrowing his forehead, too close to mine.
“Fine, I’m fine.” I shook off the last of the charm magic from my hands and the dazed hum from my head. “I hadn’t expected that much of a… surge.”
“You’ll have to explain this to me later,” Theodor said. “For now, we have prisoners to secure. And Westland Hall to search.”
He didn’t mention the last item on his short but weighty list—determine which of the Royalist leadership we would capture, or had allowed to escape. Including, possibly, his father.
The process of securing the field, moving the artillery, and beginning to evacuate the wounded from where they had fallen felt stilted, a plodding pace after the rapid wash of movement over the field of battle. I felt drained, the beginnings of a headache pressing my temples, and was grateful, for once, to be useless.
Sianh found me sitting next to the oxen. I was beginning to think one particular ox might even have warmed up to me after our day-long sojourn together. “Theodor would like you to accompany him at the house.”
“Who did we catch?”
Sianh’s laugh cut through air heavy with smoke. “Catch? Like a fish? We caught no one. Intercepted no one, took no one of import prisoner.”
My shoulders drooped, but Sianh shook his head. “No, this was expected. The king would not allow himself to be taken prisoner, for he is too great a liability in the wrong hands. What if we threatened to execute him in exchange for surrender? What then? His nobles could neither let him die nor surrender. So they will protect him first.”
“Fair point,” I said. “So why does Theodor need me at the house?”
“Family business,” Sianh said, with a strange, ominous humor coloring his faint smile. “You and two clerks are going with him to negotiate the terms of surrender.”
Polly—Lady Apollonia—waited to receive us in the grand formal parlor of the house, which was mostly unscathed save a shattered windowpane from a stray musket ball. She wore a dark blue gown of thick duchesse satin, the color and the plain trim like mourning clothes. If the rigors of a military conflict in her backyard wore on her, it didn’t show. Her hair was perfectly coiffed and powdered, and rouge stained the bow of her lips to doll-like perfection.
I slid next to an ornate cherry wood chair, knowing better than to sit and make myself at home, an unwelcome guest in this unwelcoming house. The clerks, also keenly aware that they were intruding on the private home of their vanquished enemy, quietly made themselves scarce at a card table in the corner and began setting up their paper and ink.
“Theodor,” Polly said in greeting. “Is this to be treated as a formal surrender, or will you be ransacking the house?”
“I’ll do no such thing. But why are you here?” Theodor moved toward her, but she backed away, subtly. Confirming the distance between the two of them.
“You did not expect Father,” she retorted.
“No, I did not. Perhaps Pommerly. Perhaps Merhaven. Perhaps an officer I knew, perhaps one I did not. I didn’t expect you, my dear sister.”
Her eyes grew icy at the term of endearment. “You don’t get to leverage family ties. Not now. I know that I am not valuable to the continued success of the Royalist army, so I stayed to confirm the terms of our surrender.” She raised her pert chin, her rosy lips a thin line. She was beautiful, perhaps even more so than I remembered, mature bearing and serious countenance balancing the girlish plump cheeks and wide eyes. “Regardless of what you and your lieutenants decide to do with me after.”
“You’ll be free to leave,” Theodor said, shocked. “What, did you expect me to confine my own sister to a prison barge?”
“Father would have done no better for you,” Polly replied.
“Or would he have had me hanged, Polly? Drawn and quartered, perhaps?” Bitterness finally broke through his tempered speech. I realized that my grip on the blooming vines carved into the chair back next to me was turning my knuckles white, and dropped my arm. “What did he have done with Ballantine?”
Polly blanched. “Such is done with traitors, Theo.” She sat on one side of a polished cherrywood table, her dark blue silk ballooning between chair arms built for a man, not a woman’s full gowns. “Which you knew before fomenting this rebellion. Before you turned traitor to your father, before you sought his crown for your own.”
Theodor closed his eyes for a long moment. “They’ve turned you so far against me? Polly, you know me. Have I ever hankered after power? Is ambition my greatest weakness? Hardly.” He took two confident steps toward her, but stopped as she stiffened. “You may not agree with my politics. But I want the laws of Galitha restored. Trust that. I don’t want a crown.”
She averted her gaze. “Yet the people, the angry rabble of them who would kill Papa and me as surely as they have killed so many of our friends, our cousins, our fellows—those people would put a crown on your head.” She looked up, eyes almost as dark a blue as her gown meeting Theodor’s. “You would refuse it?”
He sighed in exasperation. “I’ve far less confidence than you that they want a king at all. And I would do whatever the laws of Galitha prescribed!”
“Laws you wrote, laws that break our natural order, laws that turned this country upside down? And for what?” She shoved the chair back with a jolt and a shuddering scrape, and looked out the window behind her. “For bloodshed and pain and turmoil.”
“The nobility sowed that pain themselves,” he answered, low. “The people did not decide one day, under my tutelage or any other’s, to be discontent with the scraps we’d been feeding them. Their grievances were fair—Polly, look at me! They were just!”
She dismissed his speech with stony silence. “We ought to discuss the terms of surrender.”
“The terms of surrender, yes.” Theodor sighed. “You know, I am sure, that your position for negotiation is not strong. Unless there is something further you are considering parting with? Surrender of the king, perhaps?”
Her smile lacked all humor. “Not a chance.”
“Then terms—your soldiers and officers will spend the remainder of this war confined to a prison camp near Hazelwhite. There will be no parole, and exchanges only considered between persons of comparable status.”
“A prison camp. Better, I suppose, than ships—but oh, yes. You haven’t enough of those to spare on incarceration.”
Theodor continued as though she hadn’t spoken. “Your supplies will be forfeit to us, save the individual soldiers’ and officers’ uniforms and personal effects, which they may keep.”
Polly did not react. These were, surely, terms she had anticipated. We could not afford to send her troops back on parole, to fight another day. And we needed the supplies.
“They may march under their regimental colors, provided that they are not recalcitrant or disobedient.” This concession had been one of the only ones we could afford, and Theodor was convinced it would confirm our civility and refute rumors of barbarism. “All weapons will be confiscated.”