Chapter 44

Song waited patiently, her rifle propped up against her shoulder as the shadow moved through the bushes.

The wind was thin today and the Tolomontera winter did not often lead to fog, so there were only minor adjustments needed to her aim as she tracked the movement. Song would never quite get used to the sheer luxury of using only the finest of blackpowder and bullets, she thought. She still relished it as much as she had the first time she was handed a paper cartridge of corned powder for shooting drills.

In Tianxia, a pound of serpentine went for five Mazu silver gudai while a pound of corned went for a full gold zibao – the latter was pegged to the Sacromontan gold rama, so to practice with corned powder was quite literally firing gold at targets.

As if that were not enough she now wielded a state-of-the-art firearm, one of Osian Tredegar’s Isibankwa rifles, and though she still felt a pang of sorrow over the fate of her Zangshou musket she could not deny that the rifle did everything her old gun had but better. She’d had to drill ferociously to sand down the time it took to reload, but now that she was back to an acceptable standard the rifle had very much grown on her.

Reading the movement, Song exhaled and squeezed the trigger a heartbeat before the lycosi leaped out of the bushes. Click, snap, a small nudge of the barrel and the lemure’s brains went flying red as it tumbled down a corpse, two dozen feet away from Andreu Claver. The Savant turned and blinked, eyeing the dead lemure and then her, then tipped his hat. Song returned it with a nod. The man, if nothing else, had very fine manners.

Angharad, who’d been helping him spread the gravel, hadn’t even turned. Had she glimpsed ahead, or simply never doubted?

She set to cleaning and reloading her rifle, eyes scanning the brushlands once more. Song’s perch atop the raised stone gave her a fine view of the surroundings, and of the work unfolding at her feet: bags of gravel were being emptied on atop rocky hollows, drains were being dug to divert where the rainwater would gather up and planks hammered into place to make passageways over the terrain where wooden wheels would break or get stuck.

Even though the full span of that work was barely a tenth of the distance to the dantesvara’s lair, making it usable would take days and days of work. They had the hands for it, at least. Her bargains had seen to that.

Rifle at the ready, Song allowed herself a sliver of satisfaction as she watched Awonke Bokang order around Shalini and Musa Shange as they ripped out weeds to make room for a drain, reading on their lips how they were trading childish jibes about the meaning of ‘hoework’. Closer to her were Zenzele and Tristan, holding down planks for Sebastian Camaron to hammer into place – her Mask kept having to compensate for the slight inaccuracies born of Zenzele’s glass eye – while by a half-built ramp Izel sat drinking with a waterskin with Nenetl Chapul and a sweaty Jayati Banerjee.

The haughty Navigator seemed unusually friendly, which by the way her eyes kept straying to the muscled arms Izel’s rolled-up sleeves had bared had a somewhat amusing explanation. Not that he’d noticed, significantly more interested in Nenetl’s now-intricate steel prosthetic. Nenetl was in turn visibly struggling to decide whether she was flattered or unnerved by the attention.

Song would be headed for the drain-digging crews when her rotation as a guard ended. Tedious work, but it was sixthday and they needed to finish the second batch of drains before the rain tomorrow. Tristan had offered to take her shift – let’s be honest with ourselves, Song, I won’t be hitting any lemure with even an elementary grasp over the concept of cover – but despite the temptation she had declined. If she opened that door, Camaron would promptly throw a parade right through it. Better to just dig, it would save on complications.

The wind picked up for a breath, winding through the leaves of the many thorny bushes making up the brushland, and Song’s eyes narrowed as she shouldered her rifle again. Such a thing could serve to hide the approach of a creature, and yesterday afternoon had. Had Shalini not been at hand, the mentiroso might well have taken a bite out of Rong Ma. It’d been a young specimen, which had not yet built a ‘lie’ of a body to wear as a way to approach its prey, but in a way that was worse.

It had meant to drain the tinker’s blood, then chew up their flesh to turn it into something like paper pulp in order to make a false body out of it.

The attacks were getting more frequent, the reprieve bought by the Battle of the Barrels beginning to wane. It felt absurd that after over a hundred slain lemures their kind would resume prowling the grounds less than a month afterwards, but few of these were freshly born beasts – they came from other parts of Allazei, drawn by the empty hunting grounds. Only lesser lemures so far, though.

There were only so many great beasts in Port Allazei, and few of them were inclined to move their lairs when they were already comfortably settled. So while it was only a matter of time until full packs of shades and lycosi were found here again, it might be months or even years before the likes of a briarid or a patarico returned. They were, thankfully, rare creatures that did not breed often.

Song’s concern about the bushes being a risk was shared by another of the guards, she saw, as Ritwick Banerjee wandered among them with a pistol in hand. The sullen Someshwari kept his other hand tucked under his cloak, ready to trace, but after a few moments he ended up withdrawing.

On their other flank that pompous windbag Ruo Xian was doing the same, no doubt using the same antiquated formal language with the rhododendrons he did with everyone else – who did he think he was, the King of Cathay? – while behind her… Ferranda, Song found, had just finished a sweep of the dip behind the hill. What had the Tianxi raising an eyebrow was that instead of returning to her high ground the other captain was walking towards her.

Silver eyes flicked up down, looking for a wound and finding none. Not in the conventional sense, anyway. Ferranda Villazur made a point of looking put-together, like most Stripes – presentation was a crucial part of the illusion of control, Colonel Cao had once told them – but as she watched her colleague approach Song could make out the marks of wear and tear. The rings around her eyes from poor sleep, the listlessness in her limbs from eating poorly and even the seemingly permanent crease on her brow from the headaches that never entirely went away.

Ferranda was not taking the effective collapse of her captaincy well.

Musket in hand, the infanzona slowed her steps as she approached the bottom of Song’s perch and waited a beat before clearing her throat.

“Song,” she said. “A word?”

Song was tempted, for a heartbeat, to stay up here as she replied. The way Ferranda had treated her cabalists in her absence had earned precious little courtesy from her, despite their shared history on the Dominion. But it would have been petty of her, and pointless, so Song instead crouched and slid down the raised stone.

“Ferranda,” she replied. “Do you need something?”

That last part, she’d admit, was something of a dropped glove.

For all that the infanzona had been openly angry and resentful about Song coming into the hunt and effectively taking command of the operation, she had not dared to say much about it besides a few bitter comments. Song had not judged it worth a confrontation, not when most of the Thirty-First were currently willing to take her orders as if she were their captain. If anything, such a confrontation might look like she was cornering Ferranda and drive them back her way.

Ferranda stared at her for a moment, a flicker of something unreadable passing through those brown eyes, then the tanned woman bit the inside of her cheek.

“Advice,” she finally said. “I need advice, Song.”

That, she would admit, was not where she had expected that conversation to head.

“I’m listening,” Song replied after a beat.

Given the current state of their relations, it would not be prudent to venture advice before being told about what. What she thought Ferranda could use an opinion on and what the other captain thought the same about were not necessarily the same matters.

“Do I really need to spell it out?” Ferranda asked her through gritted teeth. “My brigade is good as disbanded, in case you hadn’t noticed. I’d be surprised if Shalini hasn’t asked about transferring to the Thirteenth yet.”

“She hasn’t,” Song evenly said.

Nor would Song be inclined to agree if she did. A second Skiritai would be a boon to the Unluckies and Shalini Goel got along well with the brigade, but if she ended up knocking at the Thirteenth’s door it would be in part because that was the roof under which Angharad’s bed lay. Song was wary of recruiting off the back of tryst that might not last, especially when recruitment meant letting in someone on their secrets – the cottage being among the least of them.

“Well, early days yet,” Ferranda bitterly said.

She would be more worried about Rong Ma, if she were Ferranda. Zenzele and Shalini were angry because their shared ties meant something to the pair. The shared grief on the Dominion had forged a genuine comradery. Ma, on the other hand, treated the brigade largely like a professional association and Song doubted they’d think twice about transferring out if made a good offer.

“I am unsure,” Song said, “what exactly it is you want my advice on.”

This time, there was nothing unreadable about the look in those eyes. Song knew anger well, and wounded pride too.

“You’re doing it wrong,” Ferranda hissed.

Fair hair slightly askew from the wind, a touch of red to her cheeks, the infanzona looked like a tower of cards about to tumble.

“Your brigade constantly picks fights with teachers and brigades, bites off more than you can chew,” Ferranda Villazur spat out. “You act unpredictably when it’s not outright unhinged, you pass on near every alliance offer come your way and it’s as if you cannot turn a stone without finding a disaster you immediately get dragged into.”

Ferranda’s fists clenched around her musket until the knuckles turned white, like she was trying to rip apart the wood and steel.

“Just this year Song, in less than two months, how much did you do? The Unluckies butchered the sailors of one of the richest houses in Malan and extorted its scion in public. Then you became the only brigade to take on both the delve and the hunt, you publicly shot a first-year in the back and poisoned her, you made and then immediately spent a fortune funding the Battle of the Barrels, your island trade venture turned into a major diplomatic incident, you were publicly beaten within an inch of your life in the Scholomance entrance hall and then barely off that stick bed promptly started a damn blood feud with the single most influential Stripe on the island, who also happens to be your covenant instructor.”

She was panting at the end of it, panting and looking exhausted.

“All in two months, Song,” Ferranda said almost plaintively. “And still the Thirteenth is thriving, you are thriving. How can that be? You’ve broken every rule there is to break.”

Song let silence reign for a while, long enough that Ferranda’s face hardened into something refusing to be embarrassment.

“Were you looking to empty your stomach,” Song mildly asked, “or are you truly interested in an assessment of your performance as captain?”

“I cannot call it luck that you stand where you do,” Ferranda curtly said. “So I would hear what you have to say.”

After that outburst she was in no mood for gentleness, so she delivered her opinion bluntly.

“You fundamentally failed at the only thing a brigade cannot do without,” Song said without missing a beat, “which is trust.”

Ferranda’s jaw clenched.

“I don’t recall you hurrying to tell your brigade about that night either,” she said.

Song acknowledged that with a nod. They’d never really talked about that evening, the two of them. Neither had missed the fact that the other also fired at Isabel Ruesta, and back on the Dominion there’d been a sense of safety in that – there were, in a way, accomplices. None could easily turn on the other, which going into the Trial of Weeds had even felt like an advantage. It was only after Song’s foolhardy insistence on doing the Lugar Vacio that the last of that complicity vanished. Once they’d realized that they both wanted Angharad for their brigade and both held the match to a grenade that could blow in both their faces.

“I did not,” Song agreed. “And I can trace back many of the mistakes I made those first few weeks to overcompensating from my guilt over it.”

Ferranda’s brow rose.

“Guilt?” she said. “This is new.”

“Over the deception, not the killing,” Song clarified.

She was yet unable to muster much regret over the death of Isabel Ruesta and doubted she ever would.

“I have come to admit to myself I did not pull that trigger for the right reason,” Song continued, “but it remains that there were right reasons.”

Ferranda grimaced.

“It made sense to me at the time,” she said. “I thought she was glutting on her contract after years of needing to watch herself in the City – treating us like some sort of sordid dollhouse playing out her tale, toying and culling at her whim. And so long as she had her claws in Tredegar, she couldn’t be touched without blowing up everything.”

It had been the final line for Song as well, the way Ruesta had seduced Angharad into some sort of idiot tryst while they were in the middle of cult and lemure infested woods. That she had done it while convincing Angharad to twist her given word into knots had seemed like an ominous sign, a herald of worst things to come.

And Song had wanted to save Angharad from peril, from herself, so that she wouldn’t be allowed to leave Song when they reached Scholomance. That ugly truth she still struggled to look in the eye, sometimes, but she must not let herself forget it.

“My mishandling of the situation nearly cost me the Thirteenth,” Song said. “Yet in the end I made apologies to Angharad and offered what reparations I could. Your situation is different.”

“It should be better for me,” Ferranda said. “None of them were… involved with Ruesta.”

“You are missing the point,” Song replied. “Pulling that trigger was one thing, every lie since another. And the lies are where the real damage lies.”

“I’ve hardly-”

“There is no point to this conversation,” Song cut through, “if you choose to willfully blind, Ferranda.”

The blonde looked like she’d just made to suck on a lemon, but she kept silent.

“When the Thirteenth came apart you good as recruited Angharad, only to then realize you had in your hands a powder charge: it could come out at any time that you’d shot at Isabel, and when it did the longer she’d had time to grow closer to your cabalists the worst the fallout would be. So you had to cut her off before it could blow up in your face, and you were handed a golden opportunity to do so when the incident with the mara happened.”

“And?” Ferranda impatiently said.

“There is a word for someone who seizes on every opportunity,” Song said. “It is opportunist.”

And it was not, generally speaking, considered a compliment.

“I couldn’t keep her on,” Ferranda quietly said. “And it was a major mistake, for her to do as she did.”

Maybe, Song thought. But you also threw out a woman who’d mere months ago fought side by side with half your cabal when she looked like a ruin and could barely walk without a cane. Her brigade had remembered that sight with their guts long after they forgot the reasons their minds had understood. And that’d sent them the wrong message.

“They’re not hirelings, Ferranda,” Song just quietly replied. “Or estate guards. If I learned anything it is that our cabalists are going to make major mistakes. There is no getting around that. So will you, so will I. And you showed them that when it happens, they will be sent out the door.”

The infanzona’s face twisted in anger.

“That’s it?” Ferranda disbelievingly asked. “One misstep and-”

“One misstep and every time you doubled down on it since,” Song harshly corrected. “When Angharad returned and the two of you became openly at odds, you said nothing even when one of your own brigade is part of her Acallar crew.”

But then how could she, when it would expose the hypocrisy of that night where they’d parted ways?

“Then every month you kept that distance, kept the feud going even though Angharad was facing monsters with Shalini and feeding ducks with Zenzele, you burned a little more trust in your judgement.”

Ferranda’s jaw clenched.

“The turning point came when you tried to have it both ways after the incident at the Old Playhouse,” Song continued, relentless. “To keep my cabalists as assets while avoiding the blowback of standing by our brigade. It was so nakedly opportunistic that even your own brigade protested.”

Song could almost hear the teeth grinding.

“The last nail in the coffin was your trying to cut them loose when the hired Navigator hounded the crew,” Song said, frowning. “You have made decisions I disagreed with before, Ferranda, but that I could see the sense in. This was not one, and in all frankness felt unusually shortsighted of you.”

Diego Calante was never going to be more than a temporary setback for the crew, given that come seventhday evening he would have to return to town to prepare for classes and so the Thirteenth would be able to do the same – and thus be able to secure means to chase him off. It reeked of Ferranda trying to part ways with the Unluckies to then parlay the discovered canalside route into joining with one of the leading crews without the heavy luggage that were her troublesome allies.

Song drummed her fingers against her arm.

“Even so, you might have pulled through and kept your brigade’s trust had you told them why you did any of it, at any time,” Song assessed. “You did not. Instead you told them to trust in your judgement, which they did – until they no longer could.”

“Is that all?” Ferranda asked, forcefully calm.

Song cocked her head to the side.

“As for criticisms?” she said. “Yes. I admit I have long been confused about your overall approach to Scholomance, but that is not something deserving criticism.”

Song knew what it looked like when someone was fighting for calm, so she stayed silent as Ferranda Villazur waged that war against her temper. She said not a thing until it was won, or at least the enemy temporarily put to flight.

“You hold me in contempt,” Ferranda finally bit out.

Song blinked. While Ferranda was yiwu by birth, Song had for some time compared her favorably in her mind to the likes of Watch princelings – who arrogated the same airs, and unlike Ferranda had renounced no tyrannical privileges by joining the black.

“I don’t believe so,” she slowly said.

Brown eyes studied her.

“Perhaps you don’t think of it that way,” Ferranda finally conceded. “But you do. Because I buckle, because I cut my losses, and you do not. And you are the measuring stick you weigh everyone by.”

Song frowned at her. And this was meant to be unusual? Everyone did this. When one spoke of a handspan, you did not imagine a stranger’s hand but your own.

“I don’t follow.”

“You want to know what my approach to Scholomance is, Song?” Ferranda asked. “I want my entire brigade to live to graduate.”

She waited for a moment, until it became clear nothing else would follow.

“Implying that I do not,” Song challenged.

“No you don’t,” Ferranda grimly replied. “Not more than you want to win Scholomance anyway, to graduate in glory, and you got all your lunatics to buy into the notion. And that’s poison, Song. Your entire brigade is poison.”

The infanzona breathed out.

“You think I don’t know my friends hated it every time I tried to distance us?” Ferranda said. “I’m not an idiot. Your Unluckies, they’re charming and they’re skilled and they’re loyal. They’re the kind of people you want on your side, so it feels like foolishness to step away from them.”

She exhaled.

“But then death follows you like a shadow, doesn’t it?”

Ferranda stared her down.

“Song, last year your brigade killed enough students to make it onto the list of causes of death,” she said. “You got into conflict with multiple brigades within a week of arriving, stumbled into an abduction ring then topped that off by turning a milkrun test into a death match with a rampant god the size of the school while intervening in the middle of a civil war.”

“We did not choose to be there for the Newborn’s rise, Ferranda,” Song curtly said.

“No, but you chose to fight it,” she replied. “To charge into the breach. You could have run, Song, you should have run. You didn’t, and it made you famous – legends in the making – but all I could think of when I heard was how lucky you got. How many close shaves there must have been. Even the Fourth, lost a man in that fight, they got so very lucky.”

Ferranda breathed out, tugged at her collar.

“I admire you for that choice,” she frankly said. “But I’m not sure anyone in your cabal will live to see twenty-five, and that’s all I want for mine.”

She laughed.

“And still I let myself be talked into reaching out by Zenzele, at the start of the year, because surely after last year you would have calmed down,” she said. “Learned to curb your temper.”

“And then the Old Playhouse happened,” Song neutrally said.

“You’d already shot up a ship crew by then, so I knew better,” Ferranda half-laughed, sounding almost crazed. “But Zenzele was so sure. They know they’re running out of rope, he said. They will try to fade out of rumor. Then Abrascal started a fucking fight to the death with an Izcalli warrior-princess by gunning down a student from behind in broad glarelight before tapdancing across the fine print of Scholomance rules.”

Ferranda Villazur rubbed her temples, as if fighting a headache.

“I don’t want your enemies, Song,” she honestly said. “I expect it makes you think less of me, but I won’t apologize because you make so many of them and they are all so fucking dangerous. And even though your brigade keeps surviving, you also keep drawing your allies into your messes.”

The hands came down.

“And I’m not Tupoc Xical, I won’t shrug it off if my cabalists die.”

Ferranda hesitated, licked her lips.

“I’ve had enough of running the wrong way,” she said. “Of having it cost me people I care about. Sometimes you need to take the loss you’ll survive even if it will be ugly, because there’s nothing uglier than death.”

“And have you told your brigade any of this?” Song asked her.

She looked away.

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“I shouldn’t have to,” Ferranda bit out. “We came in twelfth last year, Song. Twelfth. Maybe that’s not impressive to you, having come in third place, but we beat the better part of sixty brigades. And we did it without taking foolish risks, without waging war on anyone. Steady work, competence – they paid off. It worked. That should have been enough.”

Her jaw clenched.

“Instead when you talk to Camaron and Chapul they treat you like an equal, while I am not even an afterthought,” she said.

And there was a soft poison in how she’d spoken that sentence, Song thought. The sort you might drink a little sip of every day, telling yourself it would make you immune, only to find instead it’d been filling your bones the whole time. Ferranda Villazur had done it all right, the way that an infanzona and Stripe were taught to, but despite her results she’d found herself playing second fiddle to the Thirteenth.

Watching Song decline the alliance offers she’d courted, turn the worst of reputations into an asset where her carefully cultivated appeal floundered, take every fool risk and come out of it in laurels instead of coffins. She could not entirely cut ties without burning herself, and could not embrace them without the same. Fear of getting her friends killed threaded with jealousy and resentment, all coming together into a series of bad decisions Song finally began to understand.

Because Ferranda wasn’t wrong, really. She had done it the way she was supposed to, Song had not, and yet Song was rewarded while she fell behind. It would have driven Song half mad, in her shoes.

It would have driven her to do more foolish things than Ferranda’s attempts to use the Unluckies just long enough to have notches on her belt she could parlay into an alliance she actually wanted, every time failing to finish the split and wounding her brigade’s trust in her.

“Sebastian Camaron thinking well of you would not have held your brigade together,” Song finally said, for how could she voice any of the rest?

“No, but it would have meant that when reaching for allies at the start of the hunt we would have had better options than you,” Ferranda tiredly said. “It started so well last year, when I got the captain’s meetings started. Then the brigades started competing in earnest and no one wanted to share information anymore. I couldn’t even tell you when they stopped taking us seriously.”

I can, Song thought. It was when you decided not to make enemies. Reputation is the real currency on this island, and you have the reputation of someone who wants to keep her head down. The kind of brigade you might work on a shared task with, but not develop close ties. Fundamentally, she thought, Ferranda thought of alliances with other brigades the way an infanzona did. A sort of dynastic arrangement where both sides kept to their own manor, managing their own affairs and calling on each other only for business or war.

That could not work, in Scholomance. Every student had half a dozen different ties – loyalties to their sponsor, to their covenant, to mentors and causes and ambitions. The Thirty-First Brigade was not House Thirty-First, and while not every cabal was run like a family they were all run like at least a warband. Every relationship here was personal, every alliance, because that was the currency. No one would look at the rankings on Cao’s list and pick their allies off the numbers alone. And at the end of the day Ferranda wanted alliance because she thought they meant safety, while everyone else struck alliances for reasons. For causes.

She provided neither.

And that was good enough if you wanted to make pacts with the leftover brigades and the bottom-rankers, but that wasn’t what Ferranda wanted. She wanted to be one of the hallowed few, even as her approach made the likes of Sebastian Camaron and Nenetl Chapul treat her like an afterthought.

“Your meetings filled a need, at the start,” Song told her. “They died when they no longer did. It is the same with how you run your brigade.”

She met brown eyes with her own.

“You claim to put their lives above all else,” she said. “But do they? You are not their mother, Ferranda, or their lady. It is not for you to decide what they might lay their lives on the line for.”

“Your brigade isn’t a cause,” Ferranda retorted. “It is a pit.”

“Maybe,” Song said. “But it is a pit we all dug together. I give us better odds of digging our way out and surviving than I would what you’ve made of your brigade by confusing rule and command. One is a crown, the other is a trust. And for all that you whine of them lacking trust in you, it seems you trust them even less than that.”

The last of her patience and sympathy long run out, Song set down her rifle atop the raised stone and climbed back onto her perch. She did not bother with a goodbye, and after fuming at her feet for a few moments neither did Ferranda.

Song did not look back when she left.

—

In different circumstances Angharad would not have hesitated before reaching out to the Emain twins, but it could not be: given that the Twentieth Brigade was part of the hunt, it was likely the twins would require concessions related to it in exchange for their help.

Especially now that the grand alliance arranged by Song had spent afternoons clearing a way through the bushlands even on days not dedicated to the hunt. Such visible and visibly progressing labor had the rest of the hunting crews keeping a close eye on them, though none had yet dared to act against such a potent roster.

That left only a few possibilities. Awonke Bokang, though a well-inclined acquaintance from the Third, simply did not have the influence to organize a gathering of Malani nobleborn. Neither did Kasigo Njezi, who she barely knew besides. Emeni Maziya had the pull, and the captain of the Twenty-Ninth was a former of ally of Song’s, but her public break with Nkonisathi Morcant made her unsuited for the task.

Musa could have done it easily, of course, but Angharad already owed him a favor from earlier in the year and she could not risk unbalancing the alliance Song had assembled.

Of the three remaining, one must immediately be discarded: Fanyana Khosa was part of the Second Brigade, which while yet friendly to her was no friend to Song, and the man was simply too highborn for her to be able to request a favor of him on such thin grounds of acquaintance.