Chapter 30

Angharad clutched her saber as she strode out of the hospital.

Her knuckles all but turned white around the grip. The noblewoman’s teeth were clenched, her back straight and she ignored the smiling man by the door as she exited into the red-and-gold Orrery lights. It would have been simpler to simply be angry, but it was not so simple as that.

Well, Maryam being boorish was but not the rest.

Angharad marched past the guards and the pavement, hewing close to the dock wall as she chewed on the thorns she was being made to swallow. Song Ren had not, by words exact, broken with honor when killing Isabel Ruesta. The truce had been implicit, not sworn to, and though killing one fighting on the same side during a battle was reprehensible it was not necessarily dishonorable. There were precedents, if one cared to look for them.

On the other hand, Song had shot her own ally to death. It would be just and honorable for Angharad to kill her for that.

Only that was not whole of the matter either, was it? Weighing on the balance was that Song Ren had saved her life on more than one occasion, fought for Angharad’s safety and offered her a place at Scholomance. By principles alone this should change nothing, but… The Pereduri tugged up the collar of her coat and headed eastwards, along the shore.

She was not Queen Branwen, so embodying honor that she would keep rising from the dead so long as she never sullied it. It changed things some, their history. Song was not some cackling oathbreaker gone pirate, she was a respectable woman who had saved Angharad’s life on more than one occasion. The balance of duty and debt here was as a weathervane.

If she had said anything, explained herself… No, that might have been worse. Another secret being kept behind her back, known to all the Thirteenth save her. More smiles at her expense. The only certainty in all this was that Angharad could not remain under the command of Isabel Ruesta’s killer, so on that much she had acted.

To simply walk out of the Thirteenth tonight would punish more than Song, and neither Tristan nor Maryam – despite the latter’s best efforts – deserved it, so waiting in name until the end of the month was an acceptable compromise. The breach in honor would have been if she continued taking orders from Song, not by dint of some paper still deeming her subordinate to the Tianxi.

Chewing on her own anger, she looked up and realized she had no idea where she was. Near the docks, by the look of the wall, but she must have walked past the greater length of them without realizing it. Best turn back now, she figured, and cut north.

Angharad strode through the gutted remains of an old warehouse, gait still weighed with anger. The bones of the ruin allowed through stripes of golden light, like precious ribs painted on the ground. Only when she reached the doorway did she catch a snippet from the distant din of the Triangle. Her steps slowed to a halt, Angharad stopping before a long-empty doorway. She hesitated, as if stepping through would be a gesture of any meaning at all, and breathed in.

Her thoughts circled like vultures, each eager to tear off a stripe.

“Acts undertaken on the Dominion are under amnesty,” Angharad reminded the dark, and herself. “Song has not committed a crime.”

She was allowed to be angry over it, but only so much. The line had been walked and the Watch – who now carried her honor, as she carried the Watch’s – had deemed Song’s action no crime. Her fingers tightened around her uncle’s saber until the leather creaked.

It was a silly, foolish thing to feel betrayed. She hardly knew Song, for all the favor the other woman had shown her. Angharad had thought she learned a lesson on trust from the Dominion, but evidently she had not learned it whole. The details had all been there for her to put together, if she cared to look, but she had never thought to suspect Song at all. Because it meant suspicion of someone she respected.

It stung, the implication that she had not been respected back.

“Angharad?”

She was startled enough she almost drew her blade, turning to see a familiar face peeking through the doorway on the other side of the warehouse . Zenzele Duma, a bag tucked away against the belt tightening his regular uniform, looked as surprised to see her as she was him.

“Zenzele,” she replied, then remembered her manners. “Well met.”

“And you,” he said. “I thought you went to visit Song.”

“I just left the hospital,” she stiffly replied.

That mismatched gaze studied her a moment. He was all too seeing, for a man with only one true eye.

“And now you look fit to chew nails,” he observed. “Where are you headed?”

She looked away, the anger that had been in her bones melting away under scrutiny. It left little but weariness behind.

“Back to the Rainsparrow, I think,” Angharad exhaled.

“You might find that a slow trip,” he casually said. “There is something of a ruckus in the Triangle at the moment and the garrison is out in force. Some robbery went wrong and an officer was assaulted.”

Her brow rose. Ill news. She had thought Tolomontera largely free of crime, to the extent that Tristan’s petty thievery might represent a significant portion of what took place.

“Roadblocks?” she asked.

“Only inspections for now, but the lines for them are long,” he said. “If you have nothing better to do, you could accompany me in taking care of this. It will some time until it calms down, at least.”

He patted the bag at his side.

“And what is it ‘this’?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow.

He slid out the bag and tossed it her way. Snatching it out of the air, she pulled open the ropes just enough to get a look inside. She paused, unsure how to react.

“Breadcrumbs?” she finally asked.

He laughed.

“Come,” Zenzele said. “I’ll show you.”

—

It was not a long walk to their destination, just a few minutes eastward past the docks into a part of Allazei that the Watch had not judged fit to rebuild: row after row of ruins, reclaimed by nature’s greedy claws.

There was nothing obviously different about the house Zenzele led them into. The middle of the roof had collapsed, allowing through Orrery light, and nature swallowed most of what lay within. Tiles were covered with earth, weeds and thick moss while flowering vines covered the walls and what had once been the hearth now jutted out of a shallow pond like it was a decorative statue.

Zenzele’s reasons for carrying a sack of breadcrumbs were finally revealed: there was a family of ducks splashing about.

Bodied in a shade of ruddy brown with a black tail and a black head, the latter with a thick white stripe, they let out trills ending in an almost comical dry squawk as they welcomed their patron’s arrival. A repeat performance, was it? There were four ducklings with the adults, little balls of ruddy fuzz with two yellowish strips near the bill that made them look like pastry puffs. Their squeaks were high-pitched as they paddled about.

“That is dangerously adorable,” Angharad conceded.

Zenzele chuckled and guided her to a bench by the pond that, by the vine scars on it, had been stolen back from nature and cleaned off before being plopped down there. They sat and the Malani put down the bag between them, leaving the strings open. He threw the first handful, the ducklings racing each other to the shore and pushing each other off in their eagerness to feed.

“Do you happen to know the breed?” she asked.

“Alas, my knowledge of Lierganen ducks is sparse,” Zenzele confessed. “I can tell you that they disdain peanuts and love breadcrumbs, but little more.”

Angharad threw a handful of crumbs at the starvelings, which convinced one of the parents to make shore and peck at the mud. Though the entire affair was somewhat noisy, it did not feel like an imposition on the senses – more like being at a festival than a small, cramped room in a cottage while everyone emptied sacs of venom.

They kept feeding the ducks handful after handful, until the mother tried to slide her beak into the bag and Zenzele laughingly withdrew it out of her reach. This was, the duck swiftly conveyed, outrageous and unacceptable. She only realized how much she had been grinning when her cheeks began to ache.

“Thank you,” Angharad spoke out of the blue. “This was… not what I expected, but no less welcome for it.”

“I find the little joys in life to be most effective, when distracting yourself from the great sorrows,” Zenzele said, eyes on the ducks.

The mother, displeased at the lack of success delivered by her cacophonous campaigning, returned to the water to brood while the ducklings continued to beg for crumbs. The pair provided, one after the other. Zenzele Duma asked nothing, which Angharad thought was why she was tempted to talk. Had he asked, it would have felt like an interrogation. This felt like the opposite.

“I have decided to leave the Thirteenth,” she said.

He did not glance her way, instead nudging back a too-adventurous duckling with his boot. It squeaked in protest.

“May I ask why?”

She hesitated. The urge was there to simply tell him everything, but there would be a line there. Song had never outright confessed, which would make laying Isabel’s death at her feet supposition stated as fact. Too close to a lie for comfort.

“Song acted in a way I cannot condone,” Angharad finally said. “I do not wish to remain under her command.”

Zenzele hummed. He took his time answering.

“It is different from what we were taught, the Watch,” he said. “The duty is respectable, but the rooks themselves are not always deserving of such esteem.”

“There has been more corruption and venality than I expected,” Angharad murmured. “Much more, to be frank. I pledged an oath, and that will not change, but…”

“It is disappointing in some ways,” Zenzele finished, then waited a beat. “I once had a conversation not so dissimilar with my older brother, back in Malan, when he was on leave from the royal army.”

Zenzele Duma, she recalled, was the third-born of five. She had not known if those siblings were brothers or sisters, never thought to ask.

“He found corruption in the royal army?” Angharad frowned. “But they are…”

She gestured vaguely, but he understood her fine.

“The High Queen’s own blades, yes,” the nobleman said. “It seemed absurd to him that soldiers fighting under Her Perpetual Majesty’s own banner would lessen themselves in such a way. But he brought home tales of graft and bribery, of beatings and cliques.”

The dark-skinned man tossed the ducks a few breadcrumbs.

“Where there is coin there is malfeasance,” Zenzele said. “It was this way before the High Queen bound the Isles together and will remain so until the Sleeping God wakes. I think it wiser to look instead at what an assembly of men is meant to accomplish and judge them by whether they fall short of that.”

Angharad, for the barest of heartbeats, was reminded of society evenings in the Middle Isle. How the nobly born could have two conversations while speaking only one set of words, meanings behind meanings. Only Zenzele was not trying to corner her, to convey some sort of threat or boast, but was… extending a hand, using the same ways. Allowing her to choose whether she wanted to read into what he had said, matching the meaning to her parting of ways with Song.

Angharad looked at Zenzele Duma and thought she might be beginning to understand what the diplomats of the Watch had seen in him.

“It was not a crime, or strictly speaking a failing as a captain,” Angharad acknowledged. “The matter is a private one. Not something I can compromise over.”

If she did not draw the line at murdering an ally, where would she draw it?

“Trust is the foundation of a cabal,” Zenzele said. “Once that is gone, there is little left to hold it together.”

And the Thirteenth, she thought, had precious little of it to go around.

“It has been frustrating,” Angharad said, the words slipping out by themselves. “All of it. Ancestors, I cannot believe I am about to say this but Tristan has been the most dependable of the lot.”

The known thief who dabbled with poisons.

“Abrascal can be relied on to be Abrascal,” the Malani snorted. “That is to say, a man I would trust to keep his word but not leave unattended around the nice cutlery.”

“I did not realize it at first, but I believe he stole that cloak Maryam wears everywhere,” Angharad said. “She outright told me, too, only she made it sound like a jest.”

‘At that price it was a robbery’, indeed. It had taken Angharad much too long to put that one together, but she eventually had. And would have earlier, had it not been Maryam speaking the words. Angharad been too disinclined to question the rare spot of amiability to- she breathed in, breathed out. She reached for the bag and fed the ducks.

“I have not been getting along with Maryam,” she admitted once she felt calm again.

“You are from a famous sailing family and she is Triglau,” Zenzele said. “Cordiality, I imagine, must already feel like a concession on her end.”

“One she has not always been in the mood to make,” Angharad darkly said.

She clenched her fingers.

“Yet I have also given her offense, as was made plain to me,” the Pereduri admitted. “I have since been at a loss as how to balance these affairs.”

A pause.

“She is Izvorica, not Triglau,” she added. “A people within the greater region, as I understand it.”

Zenzele inclined his head in acknowledgement.

“I know precious little of the northern lands save what I learned at the isikole, which I expect differs from her own knowledge,” he said. “Still, it can be said Malan has been at war with her people for the better part of a century. Those are not easy waters to navigate.”

She slid a look his way.

“But.”

“It is a mistake to attempt to navigate these waters at all,” Zenzele frankly said. “Neither of us have answer to give to the ills that were inflicted on the – Izvorica?”

Angharad nodded.

“Izvorica,” he repeated. “Conquest is ugly business, Angharad, and while war need not be evil it always carries the seeds of evil within it. A woman who saw that darkness unleashed on her people argues not about rights and lines on a map but against the blood and screams of her kin.”

He paused.

“There is no good outcome to speaking of the subjugation of the northern lands with Maryam Khaimov,” Zenzele said. “The first lesson our teacher in the diplomatic arts taught us was that the conversations you choose not to have are just as important as those you do.”

“That is not unwise, for someone who sees her only on occasion,” Angharad evenly said. “However, she and I lived under the same roof.”

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And it was not as if she had gone out of her way to discuss the colonies, or even the Izvorica for that matter.

“The second lesson,” Zenzele gently said, “was that diplomacy is an exercise of trust. That it takes time. If there are no ties between nations when they are away from the negotiating table, a treaty becomes nothing more than an elaborate rag.”

“So it was my fault,” Angharad frowned.

Not what she wanted to hear, but coming from Zenzele Duma it was an opinion she was bound to consider.

“To think it terms of fault is a dead end,” he replied. “Different actions – from her as well as from you – might have resulted in a better relation. This did not happen. Pointing fingers does nothing to change this outcome.”

A pause.

“Decide what you want, what you are willing to give for it and what steps might best deliver that end,” Zenzele said. “The rest is distractions.”

“That does not sound like the way Malan practices diplomacy,” Angharad noted.

“It is not,” he said. “But I find that the Watch’s approach has a certain… pragmatic clarity to it that refreshing to practice.”

Angharad leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and let her gaze trail across the jostling ducklings. What did she want? Searching herself, she found the answer to be shallow. Politeness was rather the extent of it. She did not particularly want to befriend Maryam, who must have qualities but had shown Angharad little save sourness. The Pereduri had no real taste for sailing those ‘difficult waters’ again, and it was somewhat relieving to grasp did she not have to.

Maryam was not some ghost haunting her, she was entirely avoidable and they would both find their days lighter for it. The Thirteenth was not a cage, the door had been open the whole time. She had simply lacked the willingness to walk out.

“Were I to make inquiries with Ferranda,” she began.

“Yes,” Zenzele cut in, then leaned back. “You have been as a cabalist to us these last few days, anyhow.”

That too-sharp gaze lingered.

“But you will not be staying with us, will you?”

She felt a little uncomfortable at being caught out before she could say it, but she would not lie.

“Is it really a fresh start, if I merely move from one group of Dominion survivors from another?” she quietly asked.

“It could be,” he said. “But I would not blame you for choosing something I considered myself.”

She started in surprise, turning to watch his face. It was calm, but there was a tightness around the eyes.

“I had no idea,” Angharad said. “The three of you seemed so close on the Dominion, I assumed…”

“It was grief that pulled us together,” Zenzele quietly said. “I wondered, for a time, whether it was truly wise to embrace such a thing. If to begin anew with strangers would not be better.”

“Yet you decided against it,” she said.

He breathed out.

“I chose to believe there was more than grief to the ties that bound us,” Zenzele said. “That once it began to thin there would be something beneath.”

“And?”

“And I was right,” he said. “There was more to it. In some ways I regret that I will never learn who I would be away from them, Angharad, but then I suspect had I left I would we facing another set of regrets.”

He shrugged.

“Every choice carries its burdens, that is why the Sleeping God gifted us lives enough to learn from our mistakes. Paradise is earned piecemeal.”

“Redeemer talk,” she teased. “Does buying pork over beef bring you closer to eternal life as well?”

“Ugh, Universalists,” he snorted. “If my faith disqualifies, shall I find you a raised stone to ask advice from instead? I can even pretend the wind is forming words.”

“Alas, I shall have to settle for you and the ducks,” Angharad solemnly replied.

They traded grins and the conversation gave away to a comfortable silence, the ducks gorging on breadcrumbs until they tired of the meal and waddled back into the pond.

“Thank you,” she said again.

She felt him shrug at her side.

“What are friends for?” Zenzele asked.

She straightened, came to a decision.

“I would stay with the Thirty-First for a few months, at least,” she said. “Possibly the end of the year.”

“Ferranda will be pleased,” he simply replied. “You could sleep under her roof tonight, if you want to leave that awful room at the Rainsparrow behind.”

Angharad rose to her feet.

“Not tonight,” she said. “I have one last matter to deal with, I think, before I can face her and make the request.”

It was time to take up Imani Langa on that invitation to visit her. If Angharad was to break with the past, she would leave it half-done.

—

Angharad had considered the Rainsparrow Hostel a fine enough establishment, if somewhat unkempt, but she could now see why Song had been so eager to lodge at the Emerald Vaults instead: it had all the comforts of a lavish country manor.

Most of the rooms were individual, save the suites on the third level, and after asking directions at the front Angharad found herself padding past plush carpets and elegant Cathayan paintings. Tempted as she was to slow her steps and admire the masterful ink work – only Saimha portraits were held in higher esteem, back home – she had come to the Vault for a reason.

The attendant in front had confirmed that Imani was present, so now all that was left was to finish crossing the hall to the door marked with a nine in imperial numerals. That and quietly envy how the smallest room she had seen at the Vaults was easily ten times the size of the glorified closet she currently lived in.

Angharad breathed in, tugged her coat into place – idly wishing she had polished the buttons that morning – before rapping her knuckles against the door. Once, twice, thrice. There was the sound of movement on the other side, a muffled word that might have been ‘coming’ in Antigua and after a few heartbeats the door was cracked open. Only so much, the latch still in place as dark eyes peered through the opening.