She looked down at the other two messages that had brought Philemus tapping at her door and sighed. One was from Winters, the other from Rudolfo. Her eyes went to Winters’s. The girl gathered her army and marched for the Summer Papal Palace in response to the distress birds that had flooded the Named Lands two days before. To the south, Pylos and Turam also sent soldiers north. If Jin’s geography was correct, the young queen would reach the Palace later today. The other armies would be days behind, though, slowed by the harsh weather.
She vaguely recalled that Rudolfo had kept a small contingent of Gypsy Scouts at the walled mountain fortress until the work had been taken up by a handful of surviving Gray Guard just before winter fell upon them.
At the time, it had been sound strategy: The Foresters had their hands full at home and the Gray Guard were capable. No one could have foreseen this.
Her eyes moved now to Rudolfo’s message, and she read it again quickly. Beneath the casual wording of a personal message to her lay the coded script of a competent though worried general. Bring Aedric and party back, the note said. Send him west with the Wandering Army to honor our kin-claves.
But here she was faced with a hard choice, she realized. Rudolfo did not know about Neb and Isaak. And as highly as she thought of the boy-and having heard somewhat of his quiet romance with Winters the Marsh Queen-she knew that were it simply the boy, her decision would not be so hard.
Jin Li Tam had watched her father sacrifice the children he loved for what he considered to be a higher gain. She could sacrifice Neb, she knew, though it would break her heart to do so.
It was Isaak she could not give up, and for reasons only she and Rudolfo were privy to. In her early days with the Gypsy King, on the night they had fled the Summer Papal Palace and Resolute’s guards, Isaak had told her that he still retained Xhum Y’Zir’s spell, buried within his memory scrolls.
It meant that the most dangerous weapon in the world was fleeing for unknown reasons across the Wastes. And she could not abide that.
She looked away from the messages and rubbed her eyes. “How did you fare during the war?”
“My company took three Entrolusian battalions and two companies of Pylosian rangers,” he said. She looked to the scarf of rank, knotted around his left shoulder with multicolor threads woven in to signify battlefield accomplishments. She noted the pride in his voice.
Now a frank question for frank times, she thought. She met his eyes with her own. “Will you lead the Wandering Army under my direction or will that be. challenging for you?”
He paled, and she saw the sudden discomfort on his face. “Shouldn’t First Captain Aedric-”
“Aedric,” she said, “has other work to do.” Outside the room, she heard the movement of servants as the Seventh Forest Manor woke up and came to life. “When we’re finished here, send the birder in. I’ll send word to both Aedric and Rudolfo.”
At the name of his lord and general, she saw resolve take root in his jawline and his eyes. “I am honored to serve my queen.”
She nodded. “Good.” She paused a moment, trying out the next words in her head before speaking them. When she spoke them, they were solemn and clear: “Rally the Wandering Army to the Western Steppes. We ride for the Marshlands in two days’ time.”
“It will take four to reach their southern reaches. Seven to reach the Palace if we push hard.”
We won’t be going to the palace, she thought but did not tell him. “Yes,” she said.
Already, her mind composed the messages she would write and code. One to Winters to keep her army north. Another to Pylos and Turam to keep their armies south. Another to Aedric that he should find Isaak and Neb at all costs.
And last, a message to Rudolfo to let him know that Second Captain Philemus would lead the Wandering Army west, as Aedric was delayed in the Churning Wastes.
She saw no need to tell him that she intended to take their son and accompany his army with Lynnae and the River Woman in tow. It would add needless worry to him at a time when he needed his wits about him.
She forced her attention back to the present moment.
Jin Li Tam stood, and her mind wandered to the knives in Rudolfo’s desk drawer. I will take them with me.
She inclined her head to Philemus, and he returned the bow. She thought carefully about her next words and what they might mean for the tenuous bonds of kin-clave that loosely held the Named Lands together during this time of disconnection. There had been no open hostilities between the Gypsies and the other nations since Resolute’s so-called suicide. But with the assassinations, the targeting of refugee caravans and now this attack on the Summer Papal Palace, it was obvious that they were at war with someone.
The pattern was too perfect, and the strategy was better crafted than even her father could conceive.
She looked to the officer, and there was authority in her voice when she spoke. “Magick the Scouts,” she said. “Send two companies immediately to Queen Winteria’s aid. Send a company to the Keeper’s Gate with supplies for an extended search.”
“Understood, Lady Tam.” He bowed again and she returned the gesture.
After he left, Jin Li Tam opened the drawer to the desk and lifted out the old set of scout knives she’d been dancing with of late. Setting the belt aside but with within eyeshot, she took up the needle and started crafting her messages.
She took the longest with Rudolfo’s, and she was surprised at how badly she did not want to deceive him.
But more surprising than that, she realized, was how badly she did not want to disappoint him.
Still, despite her new life, she was the forty-second daughter of Vlad Li Tam, and she was once more doing what she’d been made for.
Calling loudly for the servants, Jin Li Tam scooped up her knife belt and stormed into the corridor. Strategies of war and statecraft played out behind her eyes, and her stride was deliberate and brisk.
As much as she felt fear now buried deep within her, she felt something else as well. It shamed her to name it, because she knew how wrong it was to feel this while taking an action that put her son so blatantly at risk. She shuddered at it, but still she felt it.
It was exhilaration.
Neb
Rufello’s Cave lay in stone foothills covered in gray scrub just beyond the forest of glass that had once been Ahm. From Neb’s position, it looked like a small crevasse in the side of the granite.
The crossing had been harder than he’d thought it would be, evidenced by his shredded uniform and the dozen or so cuts that covered him. Renard had tried to teach him how to move through the razor-edged forest without feeling the sting of salted glass, but as he himself had observed, it took practice.
“I cut myself for years,” he told him with a chuckle at one point when they’d stopped to bandage one particularly nasty gash in Neb’s thigh.
They’d moved slower after that, Renard never saying what Neb heard already from voices deeper inside himself. They’re slipping away from us.
Still, Isaak had left an intentional trail easy for them to follow.
Now, they had reached another stopping point.
Rufello’s Cave.
Of course, it wasn’t where Rufello had lived. Rufello had lived before the Great Migration, before even the Age of the Weeping Czars. He’d been a scientist-poet who had spent his life studying out the treasures, toys and tools of the Younger Gods, leaving behind his Book of Specifications that now only existed in fragments. According to Neb’s history lessons, the book was rare, and only scattered copies had remained past the Year of the Falling Moon-forbidden by the Wizard Kings once their thrones were established upon the earth.
The cave, according to Renard, was named for him because in it, the Androfrancines had found a cache of his drawings in a hidden library.
“When I was a boy,” Renard remembered, “my father was with them when they found it.”
They made their camp with the crevasse in view, and in the morning, they approached it.
Neb kept behind Renard as they drew closer and was surprised to see wheel ruts cut into the hard-packed ground. They stretched north and then east but did not continue south from there. They ended at the mouth of the cave. “They didn’t hide their tracks?”
Renard chuckled. “No need to. You’ll see.”
They picked their way across the rocky terrain, finally joining the wagon trail and following it the rest of the way in. The closer they came, the more Neb felt dwarfed by the sheer size of it. The crevasse stretched much higher than he’d thought. When they finally stood in the shadow of it he saw the carefully built stone wall and the massive doors just ten feet inside. At four-span intervals, massive Rufello locks made of iron dead-bolted the door closed.
Or should have.