text: Harajan was a city of faces, a wintry Saiduan city far enough south of Kuonrada to give the retreating Saiduan army some comfort that the Tai Mora were not nipping at their heels. Maralah entered the city of faces showing her most fearsome one; a graven expression she had seen on broken statues of Patrons from the early days of the Empire, when the Dhai who once ruled what would become Saiduan still held out in small groups on the frontier. Over the centuries the Dhai were slowly eradicated and enslaved. Now the Dhai were returning – or, rather, a darker version of them, from some other world.
  
  She supposed there was a great cosmic irony in that, to find her people slaughtered by those with the same faces they'd destroyed over a thousand years before. But mostly it wearied her, because in the end, it did not matter what face an enemy wore – an enemy was an enemy.
  
  As she and her brother's army stumbled into Harajan during one of the worst winters she could remember, she kept the same expression, though few had cause to see it inside her snug furred hood and wrap.
  
  She bore that expression all through the winter, until the false spring, when her brother started to hack his guts out and Taigan still had not answered the messages she had sent. Some part of her worried the missives were being intercepted by Tai Mora. But the part that knew Taigan suspected he was merely resisting, and would resist until she compelled him through the pain of the ward.
  
  The army was hungry, as were the civilians, but the Tai Mora advance had halted in the face of the weather. The weather, for all its horror, gave her a comfort she had not known in seven years.
  
  Now the weather was lifting.
  
  "You promised him Taigan would come," Morsaar Koryn, the second-in-command of her brother's army, said.
  
  Maralah found him not with the army, or with her brother, but in the scullery baking bread. He wore a stiff leather apron better suited to the butchering of ubel – the giant bear-dogs of the tundra – but his hands were nimble as they pinched and kneaded the dough. This was a man with long practice at an oven. She remembered some half-story Rajavaa had told her about Morsaar starting out as the assistant cook for the army when he was very young. Morsaar was a slim, wiry man, his hair braided back and twisted up into three tights knots on the top of his head. His most arresting feature was a long scar that stretched from the corner of his left eye and parted the upper edge of his left lip. She had known him when he was still unblemished, but had to admit the scar made him interesting as opposed to ugly. Infused weapons didn't make scars like that, which led her to wonder what man he'd tussled with in their own ranks to earn that bit of interesting.
  
  The only other person in the room was tall, handsome Kovaas, one of the sanisi she now counted among hers after the schism in Kuonrada. She trusted very few now, less every day, and she admitted that seeing his broad, glowering face here in this sea of misery soothed her. If she lost the sanisi, she lost control of her mastery over those in the hold, and then she lost control of what remained of the country. She needed every one of them.
  
  Kovaas seemed bemused, at best, by the baking.
  
  Maralah came to the end of the long stone table as Morsaar began to shape his first fist-sized loaves, pinched at the ends to resemble almonds. Maralah knew that shape well – standard issue for the army.
  
  "Don't we have cooks for that?"
  
  "We are short a cook," Morsaar said. "He fled during the night."
  
  "Then he will have no better luck leaving than Taigan has had in arriving," Maralah said. "The weather is bad. He couldn't cross between here and Anjoliaa." It was not a lie, precisely. It was an assumption.
  
  Morsaar cut a neat slit in the side of his first loaf and tucked a pickled olive inside. She admired his long, deft fingers. For the first time she considered what it was Rajavaa found so attractive in him. He took up a wooden cutout of a leaf and pressed it firmly into the top of the bread, smoothing the edges of the raised dough with a finger. Perhaps Rajavaa loved this: a neat attention to detail. An exacting concentration.
  
  "I don't see why he can't take a ship up the coast," Morsaar said. He placed the first loaf on the baking slab and pinched out another blob of dough to begin the next. Behind him, the big oven blazed merrily, emitting a slow heat.
  
  "There are any number of things he should do," Maralah said. "What I can't tell you is which one he's chosen."
  
  "Do you own him or not? You told Rajavaa he was yours." This loaf came out lopsided. He mashed the dough into a ball and began again.
  
  "You mean the Patron. I'm as troubled as you are, Morsaar. The Patron told me he had a year."
  
  "Illness doesn't adhere to a neat schedule, no more than the satellites."
  
  "Is there any other mundane thing you'd like to explain to me, as if I'm a child at your knee?" she said. "You forget your place." It was a trick often employed by men years her junior, to explain to her some trivial or obvious detail, expecting her to nod along like some honor bound wife or slave instead of War Minister of Saiduan.
  
  Morsaar straightened his spine. His fingers ceased their shaping. He peered at her from the corner of his eye. "I apologize," Morsaar said. "Do you cook?"
  
  "Never," she said.
  
  "A shame," he said, "you have the bitter bite of a woman who would do well ordering about a kitchen."
  
  "I do hope you order your army better than a kitchen," she said. "I know I do."
  
  "They are much the same," he said. He patted the loaf into shape and cut it open, inserted the olive. Pressed the leaf shape into the top. There was a preciseness to the routine that Maralah found oddly mesmerizing. Perhaps she should have learned to cook. "Hungry armies are useless armies," he said, "and we are low on onions and tubers. Bread helps."
  
  "You'll need far more than this."
  
  "The other cooks will be up soon," he said. He placed the second loaf, and took another gob of dough for his third. "I'm beginning to understand how the Dhai became cannibals."
  
  "We're not done yet, Morsaar."
  
  She heard footsteps in the hall outside, and raised voices. Her hand went instinctively to her infused blade. Kovaas moved to block the door, but it was just Driaa.
  
  "Let her enter," Maralah said.
  
  Driaa inclined her head and strode in. She looked worse for wear – her long coat was tattered, and still damp from the matted snow and ice that had melted on entering the keep. Her boots were worn. Maralah made a note to direct her to the pile of gear they'd collected from the few dead they managed to pick up before the Tai Mora.
  
  Morsaar raised his head from his work and smirked. "So the pass is open after all," he said.
  
  "Spring's early," Driaa said, frowning at the growing line of loaves. "Just our luck, no? I intercepted a runner from Shoratau on the way." She pulled a leather bound pack from her coat and handed it to Maralah.
  
  "What, they die on the way?" Maralah asked. She opened the case.
  
  "Frostbite," Driaa said. "They say he'll lose a leg."
  
  "Unfortunate," Maralah muttered, but her attention now was on the missive. It read simply:
  
  Shoratau is fallen. All lost.
  
  "Did you read this?" she asked Driaa. Losing Kadaan and Wraisau and the last of the Dhai scholars would be a blow to her and the people here. The last of their slim hope still rested on that gambit.
  
  Driaa shook her head. "Why didn't they send an infused missive? Seems a waste of a runner."
  
  "The Tai Mora have started intercepting them," Maralah said, and thought again of the messages to Taigan, the tardy replies.
  
  "When did that happen?" Driaa asked.
  
  Morsaar made another liberal dusting of flour on the stone slab. He slapped another pinch of dough off and mashed his fists into it. "The Patron split his forces right before Harajan. We tested them by sending a missive that said the majority of our forces were headed southeast to Sorvaraa."
  
  "How many died on the way to Sorvaraa?" Driaa asked.
  
  "Three hundred," Maralah said. Decoys, all, though they had not known it. Some things were better left unspoken. She imagined they thought their deaths poor luck, in the end. But she often wondered what their commander had thought, facing what must have been thousands of Tai Mora waiting for them outside Sorvaraa. Another log thrown onto the fire of the cause.
  
  "If the pass is open, the Tai Mora aren't far behind," Morsaar said. He wiped his hands on the leather apron, smearing flour across the front. "I'll tell Rajavaa."
  
  "The Patron can hardly piss straight," Maralah said. "I'll go to him. Driaa, Shao Sindaa has command of the sanisi. You can find him in the Wailing Hall. Let him know about the pass. Who's leading our retreat to Anjoliaa?"
  
  "I've put Ren Huraasa in charge of shoring it up. He's been running patrols. There's something else you should know. A week ago, we spotted ships off the coast. Tai Mora ships. Not a large fleet. But they were headed south."
  
  "To Grania?"
  
  "Yes. If I had to guess, they're assaulting Dhai or Dorinah."
  
  "Why divide their forces now, when we're almost done?"
  
  "Maybe they think we are done," Morsaar said.
  
  "I will tell the Patron," Maralah said. She turned to follow Driaa. If Rajavaa died they lost not only a Patron, but the man who commanded the loyalty of what remained of the army. Morsaar was a capable man, but she suspected his loyalty was to Rajavaa, not Saiduan. And certainly not to her. She glanced back as he lifted his first batch of loaves into the big oven.
  
  "Don't burn yourself," she said.
  
  "I never do," he said, and promptly hissed as his finger caught the edge of the oven.
  
  She smirked and went upstairs.
  
  In the vestibule outside her brother's quarters she could already hear him hacking. Two flat-headed slaves exited the room, carrying bloody linens. Those born into service were the only slaves she let care for him. Even then, rumor was difficult to quash. The Patron of Saiduan dying bloodily from a rotten liver was a hard thing to keep quiet. She pushed into Rajavaa's quarters. His personal surgeon knelt at his side, drawing fluid from his extremities. Rajavaa was a slim man, but in the advanced stages of his disease, he had swelled.
  
  "Leave us," she told the surgeon.
  
  The surgeon finished bandaging the wound and stood, without meeting Maralah's gaze. When she was gone, Maralah sat at her brother's bedside. She took his hand.
  
  "What can I get you?" she asked.
  
  He rolled his eyes at her. They had taken on a yellow tinge. "A drink," he said, and showed his teeth.
  
  "You told me you stopped drinking when you became Patron. That was months ago. Yet here we are."
  
  "Got the rot. Told you."
  
  "Surgeon said if you stopped drinking immediately you could have–"
  
  "Where is Taigan? You promised Taigan could heal me."
  
  "I promised Taigan, so you kept swilling a barrel a day? You're a mad man, Rajavaa." She released his hand.
  
  He moaned. "You haven't seen what I've seen."
  
  "I've seen more," she said. She wanted to call him weak, like their mother, a man who could not stop drinking even when he poisoned his body, and the country with him. But what she saw now was not a cowardly man with no backbone. She saw the last of her kin, dying from an illness neither of them could combat while Tira was in decline, and Taigan a continent away. He would always drink. He would never stop.
  
  "The pass is open," she said. "Taigan will be here soon."
  
  "Soon enough?" His eyes were wide, his tone hopeful, like a child's. Her heart clenched.
  
  "I thought you'd resigned yourself to die of the rot."
  
  "Morsaar could not survive that."
  
  She could, though, and he knew that, didn't he? She could survive the death of everything.
  
  "Who will take your army, then?"
  
  He broke into a fit of coughing. It racked his whole swollen body. Blood flecked his lips. "Who? Who will take the army? You will take the army, Maralah. What is left of it. You keep spinning us all around, trying to avoid it. But it's coming. You know it, don't you?"
  
  "They will not listen to me. An ataisa, maybe, but not a woman. You know that."
  
  "Dire times," he said. "Times for miracles."
  
  She leaned over him. "Then perform a miracle," she said. "Live."
  
  He gazed at the twining branches of the living hold that made up the ceiling, all painted in red and amber stripes. "Para is in decline."
  
  She patted his hand. "Para is ascendant for another year. It will be some time before we see Sina, and without my star I am just a sanisi like any other."
  
  "You could kill me cleanly, then, take my soul and arm yourself with it."
  
  "You promised me at least a year. Taigan will come."
  
  "You say that," Rajavaa said. "But I don't think it's me you're saying it for." He broke into another fit of coughing.
  
  She needed Taigan. But would he really come when she called him? That was the fear of every master – that one day the dog would no longer answer the call.