LITMIR.BIZ

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in the worst way, so ingrained in Anna’s dreams that her awareness collapsed for an instant, buckling under the weight of the impossible. But the laughter carried on, rushing to meet Anna with its mutated eastern register and violet thorns. “Casting stones won’t be necessary, panna.”

      Konrad emerged from a slender green doorway on the unit’s right, trailed by a detachment of Nahoran fighters wearing spring combat sets: thin, sand-shaded plating, draping olive cloth, and hanging stomach pouches loaded with spare ammunition. His features were unchanged, but he was no longer a charming foreigner sprinkled with northern dust. His youth was an old tree, its bark unchanged, but its core hollow and withering.

      Yet as Anna stared at him, ignoring the soft twist of his lips and his hand’s beckoning curl, she wondered whether there had ever been a core to him. Perhaps he’d always been a maelstrom of half-truths and scheming, more cunning beast than man.

      Whatever the case, he was here.

      At once Anna observed the remainder of his men. Some were perched in the high towers and rooftop gardens ringing the square, while others readied themselves at the ritual spring walls, slipping boots over their just-washed feet and lifting yuzeli from the basins below dribbling spouts. She wagered that they hadn’t installed any explosive charges in the area; after all, the civilians themselves were still largely unaware of the threat at hand, wandering between their formations and haggling over clay jugs of oil.

      “Nothing sudden,” Anna said in flatspeak.

      Konrad stopped halfway through his approach, stilling his men with a wave. He’d preserved the easy walk of a man beyond death’s clutches. “Welcome to Nahora,” he said with a sweeping bow.

      She still pictured him as she’d left him in Malijad. A blade through his forehead, blood and sweat dripping off Bora and running down his face, flames scorching the air itself and creeping toward his body.

      “Konrad,” Mesar said warmly, shouldering past his men and taking his place with Anna and Yatrin. The stiffness of days on the open road had faded, now replaced by eager eyes and a rare grin. He returned the southerner’s bow.

      Konrad had never truly slighted the Alakeph, certainly not as much as Patvor had, but Mesar’s formality was puzzling nonetheless. It had no roots in friendship nor kinship. Manufactured sincerity was the lifeblood of politics, she supposed. Under the watch of loaded ruji, it was the cost of survival.

      “As of last autumn, it’s Ga’mir Konrad Asiyalar,” the southerner corrected.

      “My apologies, Ga’mir,” Mesar said quickly. Even if the rank was unwarranted, it was a quick and wise impulse to bow down—a captain of his stature could level a settlement without a word of dissent. But the order that had inducted him, Asiyalar, carried even more considerable clout.

      Konrad squinted at the patchwork assortment of Alakeph brothers, southern fighters, northern recruits, and eastern deserters, who were marked by spines as rigid as the marble statues lining the square. “This is all you brought?”

      Anna met his eyes, but they belonged to a stranger. Malijad was a distant specter in their minds. Perhaps Konrad was even younger now, having let death race ahead of him. But Anna could feel her age, her wisdom birthed through pain, her resolve to be anybody except a pawn for wicked men. “They’re well-trained.”

      “They have interesting looks,” Konrad said, narrowing his eyes at Yatrin and Khara. “Orsas’afim nester agol?”

      Yatrin nodded. “This is our birthplace.”

      “Haven’t lost my sight yet.” Konrad grinned. “I had no idea you kept such varied company, Anna.”

      Anna looked at the gathering of bronze-skinned, green-eyed fighters gathered by the nearby archway. They were likely Borzaq, plucked from Nahora’s standard regiments and forged into something inhuman. Konrad must’ve selected them with care.

      But who had chosen him?

      “Curious that you didn’t materialize in our magistrates’ bathhouse,” Konrad continued.

      “Decorum,” Anna said. There was no sense in ceding the truth of the situation: Shem’s tunnels could only link the Nest with territory he knew intimately, places he’d surveyed exhaustively and recognized as an extension of himself and his pristine memory. Golyna was little more than a name to him.

      “It’s just quite a surprise, turning up in the flesh,” Konrad replied. “Not that I’m complaining.”

      “We’ve come to you with open palms, Ga’mir,” Mesar said.

      Konrad arched a brow and gestured at the rows of horses being led into the square. “If we sifted through their packs, what would we find?”

      “Nothing to be used against you,” Mesar replied.

      “Blades can have curious shapes,” Konrad said, smirking at Anna.

      “We’re not here for you,” Anna said. “We’ve come to see the Council in Golyna. I urge you to offer us safe passage.” Her awareness became snagged on her periphery, where Ramyi was balling up her fists and forcing hard, short breaths. The girl was too young to understand diplomacy, but too old to ignore threats.

      Konrad studied Ramyi with faint amusement. “And who is this?”

      Nausea crept over Anna, worsening as she abandoned herself to memories of the violet flower, the bright eyes among parched flats, the man who loved something other than her. The same man who’d leveled his gaze on a scared, angry girl. “Leave her be,” Anna warned. “We’re not seeking war.”

      “It must feel like a proper rest after the business near Sadh Nur Amah,” Konrad said.

      “That wasn’t our doing.”

      “My, my, the story grows richer.” Leering, he turned to face his fighters. “Not that it matters much, panna. That overgrown pit was a flag in the wind. One day our colors, Volna’s the next . . . it gets tiresome.”

      “Perhaps one of your garrisons received our glints along the way,” Mesar said.

      “They did.” Konrad lowered his hands to his hips and rocked back and forth, considering something that never reached his lips. Crowds of women and children in ruby fabric ran behind him, oblivious to the scent of imminent violence. “The Council gave me full discretion in dealing with this incursion.”

      Mesar cleared his throat, glancing back at his own men for some mesh of assurance. “Well, I ought to begin by—”

      “If I want your words, I’ll ask for them.”

      The Alakeph captain’s eyes widened as though he’d been struck. As though he were a child who’d forgotten the rules of his favorite game.

      “Going by principle,” Konrad said, his gaze sweeping back to Anna, “Perhaps I’ll look each and every one of you over. My unit can read the truth of a twitching hand.”

      “We won’t beg for our lives,” Anna said.

      “Beg?”

      “Do what you wish.” Sweat coalesced in cool pockets along Anna’s palms. Her breaths were short, stifling, squeezed through a tightening airway. She’d mastered the art of bluffing with wicked men, but those days were long gone. “You’ll be giving us a merciful gift, cutting us down before Volna ever has the chance to drag us out of our fighting holes. We can offer more than our blades, and your masters surely know that. But we won’t be toyed with, and we won’t bare our bellies. Choose wisely, Konrad.”

      Mesar’s long, aching exhale was lost to the sound of children’s laughter.

      And in the crystallizing silence, stranded between Konrad’s blank stare and the expectation of countless ruji tearing into the tender flesh around her, Anna held her pointed gaze. It was a taunt, an invitation to the bloodshed Konrad surely craved. All it would take was his raised fist, or perhaps a coin flipped up in the air, glinting as bursts of metal shavings

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