“So you didn’t want mercy for Ruadhán, because you’re afraid he’ll hurt us.”
“How many second chances does a man get? I would’ve said one, and that then he deserves everything he gets and worse. But you give Conn Arthur a third chance—and it feels right. You confuse me, and I can’t tell if things work out for you because different rules apply to you, or if you’re just the only person I know brave enough to try them.”
So that was why Cruxer had almost stopped Kip from stepping in front of the window that day: anyone else, he would have stopped, but Kip?
The young commander scrubbed his fingers through his short curly hair. “It’s different, right? Up near the top of the Great Chain, the lines get fuzzy. I know the Lightbringer is going to upend everything. You have to obey Orholam, and you have to figure out if following the Chromeria’s will fits with that. Me? I hate that kind of thing. I’m not equipped for that stuff. Not made for it. You decide where Orholam calls us to go. Me? I follow you, unless you do something that outrages the light of conscience Orholam gave me.”
“Or if I put myself in danger,” Kip said.
“Well, I do get to save your dumb ass from yourself, yes,” he said with a short-lived smile. “But that’s not quite the same thing.”
Kip nodded agreement, but his heart ached. How do you save a friend who’s had a trauma burn the wrong lesson onto their heart in words of fire? “Cruxer . . . This rigidity in you, this fear? That’s still the wound. Not the healing. You know that, right?”
“No. It’s not. This is righteousness, and a man must fear he’ll lose his integrity in a world like this or he’ll never keep it.”
“True . . . true,” Kip said. And entirely beside the point. He tried another tack. “There were two brothers. During a siege of an enemy city, they heroically broke through a burning sally port door. The city was taken, but they fell wounded and later shared a room as they convalesced from their burns,” Kip said. “Day after day, they spoke as they were able.
“ ‘Fire’s hot,’ the first observed.
“ ‘Still hot, weeks later,’ the second agreed.
“ ‘Burns are the worst,’ the first said.
“ ‘The absolute worst,’ the second agreed.
“ ‘Bravest thing I ever did,’ the first said.
“ ‘Dumbest thing I ever did,’ the second said.
“The first said, ‘If we’d waited, a defender might’ve extinguished that fire, and many more of our friends would have gotten killed trying to take the city.’
“The second replied, ‘If we’d waited, that burning door might’ve fallen down by itself, and we wouldn’t be here, and no one would have gotten hurt saving us when we fell wounded.’
“ ‘There’ll be another battle next month or next year, but we did what we had to, and we did it as well as we could,’ the first said.
“ ‘There’ll be another battle next month or next year, so we didn’t really accomplish anything,’ the second replied.
“Which one’s right, Cruxer?” Kip asked.
Chapter 42
Dawn hadn’t yet rolled over in her bed, much less brushed the horizon with groggy fingers to see if her lover still attended her. But despite the darkness, the armor-bearers and bakers and coal-carriers and dung-boys and the egglers and the fletchers were already up, their diurnal labors slowly displacing the stubborn nocturnal revelry of those soon leaving to greet death. The garrulous and the hateful and the inquisitive and the jocular would come later to see them off. Kin and lovers would trail behind, some mothers following for a league or more, unwilling to turn their faces from sons and daughters they might never see again.
Kip had come down from the wall and the mirror and his angry wife to walk from campfire to campfire, clapping shoulders and admiring weapons and offering a ready ear. Being seen, mostly, though it meant even more to those he touched and nodded to and questioned. A hundred times, he’d raised some offered skin, but had let neither beer nor brandy nor more exotic brews beyond his lips.
A hundred times, he saw a man he barely recognized in his people’s eyes, and he didn’t know if he could maintain the image of that hero and yet remain himself.
“There’s a sadness about you,” a logistics officer in her forties said. “You got respect, wealth, position, beautiful wife, friends—whole world in your purse. What’s that about?”
She was one to know sorrow. When she’d refused to hand over the location of her daughter and several of her grandchildren, the Blood Robes had burned her brewery down—after locking two of her other grandchildren inside. The daughter who’d been saved couldn’t forgive her for it, so she’d left it all and joined up.
Kip met her gaze. “I want to lead as well as you all deserve, and I’m afraid I won’t.”
Her eyes widened briefly at his honesty, and he could see her tuck that away to share it with others later.
They would love him more for it, he knew, but that hadn’t been why he said it. Somewhere, oddly, he’d displaced some essential part of his fear. He wasn’t, perhaps, fully the man they thought he was, but neither was he a fraud.
It also wasn’t quite the whole truth. Tonight felt like a little death; tonight was goodbye—though he couldn’t tell them that. Every hour of surprise that he gained on the White King and separately on his generals at Green Haven was an hour that might mean the difference between victory and defeat. So Kip had to endure this goodbye alone, even while in the company of those he’d come to love.
He joined the fire of some river sailors and longshoremen and asked a question about some intricate knot a man was using. When he didn’t understand the answer about why a particular fiber was good for a task, he asked again, and then a follow-up; he dared to do so now because he wasn’t afraid of looking stupid. Even if he would never understand the things these men understood easily, it was no essential threat to him. He did other things well. He didn’t have to be good at everything.
Strangely, that lack of fear of failure made failures infrequent.
When he understood and asked if that meant you would use that particular knot with these cotton ropes in this kind of application, but only use it with a hemp rope in these other ones, they seemed to think he was a genius.
For a noble anyway, one offered, testing to see how prickly he was.
He laughed, though. “I see I’m not the only bastard here!”
They lit up. It was almost too easy, with men who wanted to like you.
Then he indulged his curiosity and threw a problem at them. “So let’s say I’ve got a stallion. Fully barded. Sixteen hands. Weighs, what, probably nineteen and a half or twenty sevens? Got a wall fifteen paces high, but straight up, sheer. We can get right to the base. What ropes and knots do I use to lift him as quickly as possible to the top of the wall? And how long does it take? Let’s say I’ve got access to hemp ropes and cotton, much as I need. Manpower’s no problem, but time is.”
They peppered him with a few other questions about what other supplies they had available. Pulleys? Nets? In a minute, they’d devised and refined a plan. Their pleasure in demonstrating their mastery told Kip he was on to something he should repeat at the other fires.