Chapter 229: Two Armies in the Dark
They left Northreach at dusk, eleven of them, with no banners and nothing on their gear to say whose they were.
Xuan looked back once from the valley road. The fortress stood black against the last of the light, allied torches crawling along its three rings, gates being braced, grain hauled up the slope by men who had two weeks to turn themselves into a wall. Somewhere on that rampart the Frostmoon captain was already arguing with the Thunder Lotus elder about who got the good arrows.
"They’ll hold," Qingyue said beside him.
"Some of them."
"Yes." She didn’t soften it, which he loved her for. "Some of them."
The eastern trails were goat paths and dry riverbeds, and they rode them in the dark without torches because Xinhua had walked this country as a girl and swore she could find the ridge blind. Nobody argued. A princess who could navigate a province from memory was worth more than a map, and by the second night Xuan had stopped pretending he’d have found the route himself.
The healers’ paste had done its work on his ribs. He could breathe without wincing, could lift Marrow Dragon without his chest filing a complaint. His qi had crept back in, a slow tide refilling a dry well, and the pill went on quietly not being taken.
’Still no. Even here?’
[ Even here, ] Mira said. [ A cave with a blanket over the mouth isn’t a door. When there’s a wall and a lock and somebody standing outside it who likes you, we’ll talk. Until then you carry it and you stop asking. ]
’You’re enjoying holding it over me.’
[ Enormously. It’s the only leverage I have and I intend to squeeze it dry. ]
They reached the ridge above the north road on the third night, and lay flat in the scrub, and watched fifty thousand men walk south underneath them.
It took hours.
Xuan had thought he understood what fifty thousand meant. He’d been wrong. The column came out of the dark like something geological, a river of torchlight three miles long, wagons and spearmen and cavalry and siege engines pulled by teams of oxen, boots hitting the road in a rhythm he could feel through the rock under his chest. Nobody on that road was hurrying. They didn’t need to. They were the biggest thing in the province and they knew it.
Halfway through, the banners came past.
[ Cloud Veil, ] Mira murmured, ticking them off. [ That’s a great sect committing openly. And behind them — Ashvale. Both of them. Xuan, that’s two of the three great powers of the East marching under one prince’s colours. Whatever Tianlong promised them, it was enormous. ]
’And they’re all going the wrong way.’
[ They’re all going the wrong way. Which is the single most beautiful thing about this whole horrible situation. ]
Beside him, Xinhua watched her brother’s army pass with her chin on her forearms and an expression Xuan couldn’t read at all.
"He’s down there," she said, so quietly it barely carried. "Somewhere in the middle of that. Sitting in a warm carriage, reading reports about the fortress he’s going to take back, feeling the exact same way he felt when he was nine and won every game we played."
"You want to be down there."
"I want him to see me before it ends. That’s all. Not for the war. Just so he knows I was the one." She let out a breath. "Which is a stupid thing to want, and I’ll do it your way instead, so don’t tell anyone I said it."
"Say worse things to me and I’ll forget those too."
Her mouth twitched. She didn’t look away from the road.
The last of the column went past an hour before dawn. They lay in the scrub until the dust dropped out of the air and the world was theirs again, and rode north on an emptied road, three days from a capital with nobody left in it.
Two armies in the dark, each walking to the other’s house.
They saw the first refugees on the afternoon of the fourth day.
That was wrong, and Xuan knew it was wrong before he understood why. Refugees moved away from armies. Tianlong’s army was three days south of them and marching further away by the hour, and this road was the safest ground in the province. There was nothing between these people and Tianzhao except twenty miles of good farmland.
They were coming from the capital.
Dozens at first, hundreds within the hour, whole families on foot with what they could carry, some of them barefoot, none of them talking. Carts abandoned on the verge with their loads intact, which no fleeing family did unless the fleeing had become more urgent than the load. Xuan counted three dead oxen still in their traces and nobody stopping to butcher them.
Xinhua stopped a woman on the road, and it took her three tries to get a full sentence out of her.
"The upper city," the woman said. Her eyes were fixed somewhere behind Xuan’s shoulder, on nothing. "Four nights ago. The whole hill went dark - the lamps, the ward-lights, the fires in the shrine. Every light on that hill went out at once and they haven’t come back on."
Qingyue crouched to her level. "Did the fighting reach you? Did soldiers come?"
"There aren’t any soldiers." The woman laughed, and it was an awful sound. "That’s what nobody understands. The prince took them all south. There’s nobody left to fight. The city’s empty of soldiers and it’s the emptiness that’s wrong." Her hands twisted in her skirt. "Things are coming down off that hill at night, and they aren’t soldiers, and the guard that stayed behind won’t go up there, and the ones who did go up haven’t come down again."
Xuan and Xinhua traded a look over her head.
"Four nights ago," Xinhua said carefully. "You’re certain of the count."
The woman nodded.
Xuan did the arithmetic and did not enjoy the result. Four nights ago was two days before the rider reached Northreach. Four nights ago was when a drunk prince nobody had ever taken seriously walked out of Tianzhao in the dark and vanished, and left an entire empire wondering what he’d taken with him.
[ Xuan. ] Mira had gone flat and careful. [ He didn’t take anything. ]
’No,’ Xuan agreed, watching a line of silent people stumble south past his horse, away from a city he had three days to walk into. ’He let something out.’