LITMIR.BIZ

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with a velvet sleeve. “What’s he got to do with the hunt? He ought to be in fetters, far as this city’s concerned. Maybe on a stake.”

      “Konrad was supposed to address you fully on the issue,” Anna said. “Yet I now understand his reservations. If finding their remnants is truly your focus, then you’ll need to trust me when I ask for your cooperation. You’ll need to bury whatever judgments you hold in your hearts.”

      “Judgments,” Jenis laughed. “Look upon him as a babe, shall we?”

      The others offered a round of curt, vacuous laughter. It was difficult to laugh—earnestly or otherwise—in the face of men who had taken so much.

      “It’s our only path forward,” she explained.

      “That’s what splits us, Kuzalem. You tossed your Breaking around to scrape out what’s between haunted ears. But sometimes, a man needs his wrath. Any widow here would burn an offering to that.”

      “What end would come of it?” she asked, examining the rusty age spots and creases on the old fighter’s face. His weariness was a constant pall rather than a mask, bubbling up like a spring that merely hinted at some abomination beneath it all. But she understood his breed, his predicament: An old hound, starved of masters or vigor, knew only of gnawing flesh and barking at shadows. “His death is, and will be, a simple matter. He’s accepted that. But he’s also the antidote to their pestilence. How many times can you apply the same balm to pox-eaten flesh, Jenis?”

      “Slishaya,” Jenis snapped. “We’ve made good on giving you silence, girl. Not a doubt that they tore up your soul in the east. But now you drag your mountain mud in our hall, speak to us like our stones are high up in our bellies—not a fucking chance.”

      “Bold words from the Bala,” the tracker said.

      A rash of curses exploded from Kowak’s council, flowing between river-tongue and the grymjek alike until Anna slapped the table with a rigid palm. “Enough. What would you have me do, Jenis?”

      The old captain stroked his beard. “Balm. You call our blades and ropes a balm? Your soft-skin girls in the monasteries would let us burn every notch of the flatlands. That’s where they’re prowling, you know. Everyone knows it.”

      “Blood begets blood,” Anna whispered. “I’ve seen how you track them down.” The term Kowak confession had made its rounds in most cities, according to the Alakeph captains still operating across the Hazani chapters. It was no secret that the southerners craved names and names only.

      No matter who owned them.

      “You’d trust this beast?” asked another man with scar-threaded lips. One of his eyes stared off into the darkness of the neighboring chamber. “Harden your skin, Kuzalem. This is Volna’s death.”

      “I’ve seen how these movements die,” Anna said, glaring at Jenis. “They can be hanged and bled and beaten, but they’re never truly extinguished. Our victories are what puts divine fire in their hearts.”

      “Seems she knows a fair bit about us beasts,” the tracker said.

      She stared into those bloodshot eyes, her lips pursed so tightly that they began to quake. “I do.”

      Studded soles came clapping down the corridor at Anna’s back, muffled by the ancient wood of the chamber’s doors. Stillness descended over the gathering.

      Anna turned just as the branded women slid the oak bar from its brackets and drew back on iron handles. The doors parted with a deep, aching groan, allowing Konrad to rush into the assembly and its pooling silence with white robes billowing behind him.

      “Apologies for my delay,” he said, settling into an empty chair at Anna’s side.

      “Ought to be the least of your regrets,” one of Jenis’s captains said darkly.

      “It was only sensible, wasn’t it?” Konrad asked. “How many of the cartel’s blades keep an ear to the privy chambers on the Broken Knoll?”

      “We’re not children,” another man snarled. “Hazan’s not some beast in the fen.”

      “You’re right,” Konrad replied. “They’re in every tavern and foundry from here to the plains.”

      “Lying’s a way of life for you,” Jenis said, unsealing his second bottle with a faint pop.

      “He told you what was necessary to bring you here,” Anna said. “Now, the choice of whether to listen or bury our words is yours alone. But I caution you against turning us away, Jenis.”

      “That so?”

      “I’ve come here to safeguard your claim, not usurp it.” She watched the old man’s eyes flitting around the assembly, weighing his prestige in the eyes of fresh captains, his trust in comrades from dead wars, and his hatred of everything Volna had been, now distilled like some vast reservoir of tar and ash in the tracker’s stare. Volna’s fall had done more than left the world in need of wardens and governors; it had awoken the ambitions of cruel, long-spurned men with coffers too barren for their liking. “Will you hear me, Jenis?”

      Jenis braced his hands on creaking knees and cast his gaze away sharply, almost as though bristling at a bitter swill of his drink. “What’ve you come for?”

      “Eyes and ears,” she explained. “He’ll give us the shards that have been missing from your operations. All the missed movements, the names, the intermediaries. It’s systemic, Jenis, and it needs to be severed at the root.”

      “Seven hundred marsh-born men went to the plains,” Jenis said. “Not one returned. Boys too young to know the feel of a tit are carrying their fathers’ blades.” In one tremendous swig, he drained the last of his bottle and set it down gently at the edge of the table. “We’ve nothing to spare your errand.”

      Anna sighed. “We’re not asking for men. The Alakeph can bear that burden well enough. What we need are your breakers, your reports, your—”

      “Your,” Jenis said, scowling at Anna and Konrad. “Got a knack for that word, girl. Wasn’t so long ago that we gave you everything we had.”

      “And now we’ll finish it.”

      “Quit spying at stars.”

      “If it’s not your problem now, it will be.”

      “Our problem’s with the scalp-trimmers in the bogs,” he said, spittle bursting from his mouth as he raced on. “No, no, it’s with the mad korpy in the market, raving about spirals and lines and angles, world-eaters and all the rest. Maybe with those province-breakers, burning their own fields.”

      Anna’s jaw was aching once more. “You’re not—”

      “Head in the reeds, like all the others,” Jenis rasped. “Know how my breakers spent their dawn, Kuzalem? Tracking up and down the Nekresa’s banks, dragging farmers out of those shit-stained hovels, asking who saw what? and when was that? to know about those scribes of yours. Two young ones—must’ve been eleven or so, says my men—skinned, cut up, left in sacks by the road.” He met Anna’s eyes directly and at once his gaze was piercing, stripped of its languid veil and haziness, so startling that it forced her to glance away. “That’s a wild dawn. Something’s burning, all right, but not in Hazan. It’s in your fucking nursery.”

      Anna strained to repress the sudden rush of bile in her throat.

      A dozen in a cycle, and that tally was still mounting. She should’ve expected it from those who’d known the war’s cost firsthand, especially in the rural provinces, where fear prevailed over wisdom in matters of resolve. That which they could not explain had to be destroyed, lest it destroy them, too.

      How often had saviors been mistaken for serpents?

      “Done here?” the tracker asked, stretching forth with a dull crack down his spine. “Heard wiser words minced between field oxen.”

      Anna

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