Chapter 61

“Huh,” Maryam said when the tale was done, honestly a little impressed. “That’s not just a fumble, it’s a disastrous fumble.”

“I am not unaware,” Song replied through gritted teeth.

Oh, she hadn’t liked that.

“A calamitous fumble,” Maryam continued.

The teeth grit harder, but not hard enough. Another log must be tossed into the fire.

“Perhaps even a cataclysmic fumb-”

“Maryam,” Song hissed angrily.

“Fine, fine, I’ll stop,” Maryam lied.

She would give her captain an hour of peace at most. Occasions to hold Song’s feet to the fire until the room smelled of pork were too rare not to thoroughly abuse when they popped up. It was like corn, you had to get your fill when it was the season for the crop.

In a sign of genuine distress, Song Ren had for once in her life refused an offer to sit down for tea when she came to Maryam looking like she did not know whether to scream or throw up. Instead the visibly troubled Tianxi – the visible part was yet another warning sign – had sat on her bed with her knees folded against her chest, holding one of the single dryest historical chronicles Maryam had ever disinterestedly paged through the same way a child would a blanket.

As a good friend, the signifier had refrained from eating the nuts in a bowl on the table since the crunching noise might distract some from the tale being told. Even though she was pretty hungry. Cashews, though. She would be getting back to those later.

“It does not sound unsalvageable, if that’s your worry,” Maryam shrugged. “Say what you will about Angharad Tredegar, but if she is finished with you there will be nothing uncertain about it.”

Neither frosty disdain nor public stabbings left a lot of room for speculation as to the Pereduri’s opinions.

“I may well have killed any friendship there was between us,” Song sharply said.

“Then you killed that back on the Dominion when you pulled that trigger,” Maryam said. “Everything that has been built since that moment was a manor on quicksand.”

She met Song’s gaze unflinching until the silver eyes turned away. Killing the infanzona had not been a moment of pride, whatever else might might be said of it.

“Ruesta was too dangerous to continue letting loose,” Song said. “Even within days of Angharad knowing about her contract she had her charmed and toeing the line of her promises again.”

“All that Malani ever do is toe the line of their given oaths,” Maryam snorted. “They tie themselves up in knots and call it an honor when they figure out how to live with what give there is in the rope.”

She cleared her throat when Song turned an unimpressed look on her. However true, her words had drifted some from the matter at hand.

“You made the decision that Isabel Ruesta should be killed,” Maryam said. “Fair enough. I am not certain I would have made the same – and I know Tristan would not have, if only in the hope that released back into Sacromonte that snake might yet bite other infanzones – but part of the trials was to make those decisions. It was your right to make that choice, and even to hide it.”

That was part of the trials as well, after all. To clip the wings of threats and get away with it, to make the right allies and the right enemies. The Watch was looking for killers and survivors, not would-be martyrs. Maryam did not begrudge Angharad how she had played the trials, trying to save as many as she could and holding to gallantry as law, but it would be childish to pretend hers had been the only valid path.

Tupoc Xical had spent his entire stay malingering, betraying and murdering but the Academy had still welcomed him with open arms at the end.

“That is not how she sees it, evidently,” Song muttered.

“That’s because when the trial ended, you didn’t tell her the truth,” Maryam said, and hesitated.

It did not escape the silver gaze.

“What?”

The Izvorica sighed. She was not eager to get into what lay between the two of them, but she supposed she owed Song as much.

“I’ve sat across a table from Angharad Tredegar quite a bit, over the last month,” she said. “And she’s not… inflexible, at least not in the way we sometimes assume of her. She would not be able to use her contract the way she does if that were the case. You keep missing it because you have the Tianxi blinders on.”

“Pardon me?” Song said, a tad coolly.

“Your people love an absolute, Song,” Maryam bluntly replied. “It’s in the bones of everything you make and do. All are free under Heaven, yes?”

“I don’t follow,” Song frowned.

“Your poetry is always about how that moonlit night is the most beautiful there ever was, that tragedy the most despairing. Your enemies are the most wretched, your affairs the most sensual. Everything Tianxia does is on a bedrock of universal truth.”

“I am unsure whether or not I should take offense to that description,” the other woman admitted.

Maryam rolled her eyes. Only gods and fools took offense to their reflection in the lake.

“My point is, the Malani do not have that,” she said. “All their truths are circumstantial. Limited.”

Song blinked.

“That is madness,” she slowly said. “Malani are famously obsessed with an unbending code of honor.”

“That’s reputation, Song,” Maryam chided. “Look at how they act, though. They qualify every sentence, word them to get around potential lies, say ‘I believed’ or ‘I think’ instead of ‘it is’. The only way they can function is by putting every action they take or witness in a little box that separates if from every other action taken.”

Sometimes she thought that the way they were able to swallow something like slavery so easily was that their honor was not so much about espousing good deeds as containing fault.

“That’s…” Song trailed off. “Well, one of the most interesting interpretations I have heard of Malani customs, but also a different discussion.”

“No,” Maryam said. “Because my point is Tredegar thinks exactly like that. If you had told her at the end of the trials she would have understood you deceiving her as being ‘part of the trial’, a closed garden where that action remains reprehensible but is allowed by the rules. But then you kept lying by omission when the only circumstances between you two were purely personal, so that part she can only take personally.”

Men tolerated things from a practitioner or a king they would not from a brother, even though they loved the brother better. The role mattered as much the act, sometimes.

“I don’t see what difference what you said makes,” Song admitted. “In the end, however roundabout the path the conclusion is still that she is angry at me for withholding the truth from her and acting behind her back.”

Maryam smoothed away the flare of irritation. For someone so clever, so capable of reading a room and turning enemies on each other, Song could sometimes miss the forest for the trees. It was not her fault, though, it was Maryam who was odd. She had to think the way she did because she was far away and surrounded by strangers whose strange ways were opaque. Knowing why people took offense to the things they did was the difference between a cold look and drawn blade.

She did not have the luxury of ignorance, not when her mistakes were always paid for.

“Because you’re not just fighting with her,” she spelled out, “you are in a spat with how Angharad Tredegar sees the world. Tea and apologies and a grand gesture aren’t going to fix this, Song, because that would be two friends mending a bridge and that’s not the trouble you’re in. Not really.”

Song’s lips thinned. Bunched up like that on her bed, the Tianxi was unusually open in her expressions – the layer of calm and control thinned enough Maryam could easily make out the shapes moving beneath the silk. Song Ren was not convinced, but enough of what she had been told rang of the truth she was considering it seriously.

“Then what do I do?” she quietly asked.

Maryam leaned back in her chair and grabbed some of the cashews from the bowl. She’d done good work, wages were owed.

“Prove her wrong by her own rules,” she replied. “Demonstrate that, within personal circumstances, you do trust her.”

“That easy, is it?” Song sarcastically asked.

Maryam popped a few cashews, chewed merrily. Salted! She stole a second handful even though the first was not entirely finished, loudly swallowing.

“Figure it out,” she shrugged. “Look, on occasion I might like Angharad Tredegar but at the end of the day I don’t like Angharad. You understand?”

“We barely speak the same language,” Song snorted, “but I catch your drift. Her being personally agreeable does not change most of your grievances with her.”

Maryam nodded approvingly. She had once thought there was no way the two of them could share a brigade, but she had been wrong in that. Angharad was not… malicious, even at her worst. Childish or selfish, but not with a poisoned edge. That she could adjust, and made an effort to, made her tolerable and admittedly sometimes even enjoyable. In small doses.

Maryam could not see herself ever considering the other woman a friend so long as she did not grasp the evil that lay at the heart of Malan, cloaked in talk of laws and honor, but a brigade was not a sworn sisterhood. They could share a roof and a side without braiding each other’s hair.

Song slowly exhaled, her knees pulling away from her chest as her legs spread on the bed. The book ended up on her lap, only loosely held.

“She said that Ruesta only wanted to live,” Song finally said. “That to kill her was unnecessary so close to Cantica.”

It was unfair to be irritated with her for that, Maryam told herself. For not getting it. Song had to think that deeds were the only that mattered, because it was the only way she could go to bed without weeping. If Song Ren did not believe that actions were what mattered most, that they defined everything and could change everything, then the certainty that had her get up in the morning and pursue the dream of overturning the legacy of the Dimming would crumble like wet paper.

It was just that sometimes that also meant Song thought of everything as things she did right or wrong, like the world was a puzzle box she had to solve correctly. Maryam felt a pang of sympathy for Angharad, who she suspected mostly wanted to know that Song did not think of her as being the Watch equivalent of an expensive warhorse.

“Days away with hollows nipping at your heels and everybody dead tired isn’t nothing. And Ruesta was constantly using her contract after having made a promise not to, the way you told me,” Maryam finally said. “Sure, a promise she was technically no longer bound to, but by that same logic you were no longer bound not to put a bullet in her skull.”

Hilarious that Ferranda had tried the same thing just a moment before, really. The infanzona reminded Maryam of some of her mother’s war captains, the ones with fine reputations and rivals who kept dying on raids.

“It is frustrating she would still defend someone using a charm contract on her even now,” Song admitted. “Enough to make me wonder at her judgement.”

“It was an influence contract, not control,” Maryam reminder her. “There’s a good argument there were insidious secondary effects to it, but I don’t think that the girl with the big eyes and the bigger tits had to do a lot of charming to talk Angharad Tredegar into walking the fine line of a promise so she’d be able to get her hands under that skirt.”

“Maryam,” Song reproached, coughing into her fist.

“That’s a lot of coyness from a girl who went for seconds in the creepy brass house,” Maryam retorted without batting an eye.

Cheeks flushed red.

“I should never have told you that,” the Tianxi muttered.

The signifier grinned. Too late for regrets. Between that and the admission that Evander Palliades was not above getting on his knees to convey his negotiating position to the Republics – and successfully, too, good on him – she had material to work with.

“But as for Tredegar… she’s always going to be who she is, Song,” Maryam told her. “Eager to get pretty girls into bed and trying to protect as many people as she can whether they deserve it or not. I’d think hard on that before deciding how far you want to go to mend bridges.”

Song frowned.

“Whether it is the friendship I want to salvage or whether I still want her as part of the Thirteenth,” she said.

“You talk like you do,” Maryam said. “And I don’t hate the notion the way I did back at Scholomance, I’ll grant.”

The Tianxi studied her for a moment.

“And Tristan…”

“I do not, in fact, speak for Tristan Abrascal,” Maryam drily said. “We argue too, you know. But if I had to wager, I’d say that he will be comfortable with the idea in a Tristan sort of way.”

“Afraid of her, but the danger is predictable and thus makes him feel safer than if there was nothing visible to be afraid of,” Song said.

Essentially. Their captain was beginning to know the man decently. In truth Maryam suspected that her viper rather liked Angharad, simply in a way that involved no true loyalty or investment of emotion. That was the Murk in him, she thought, and this Nerei’s lessons too. He’d been taught it was fine to like others, so long as it was shallow and did not weigh more than a feather on the scales.

“The friendship, at least, I would save,” Song murmured. “It was… I do like her, you know.”

It’s just that everyone else liked her too, Maryam thought, and you liked that almost as much as you do her. She could not even be too angry about that, now when could understand Song’s craving better than most. She had not grasped how much she liked to be liked before being met with casual contempt and distrust everywhere she went. Song had liked to stand by the hearth and bathe in the warmth, even if it wasn’t really hers.

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“It is refreshing, being with someone who wants to be good, and she is surprisingly funny,” Song continued. “Even as a captain, I think we are better off with her.”

The Tianxi set down the book on the sheets. Maryam discretely ate a mouthful of cashews in the interval, ceasing to chew when Song’s attention returned.

“Not even because of the blade, though that is no small thing, but she does not compromise as easily as the rest of us do,” Song murmured. “She wants us to do things right – I wouldn’t have thought twice about that deal with the Brazen Chariot, if she hadn’t said anything.”

She discreetly swallowed.

“But,” Maryam said.

“But we won’t always be able to do things right,” Song said. “That is not a luxury we have as members of the Watch. I’m not sure if she will understand that. And, to be frank, I do not always agree with what she feels is right in the first place.”

Maryam said nothing, for she had already spoken all the words she had it in her to speak. While she would consider being the voice of virtue to the Thirteenth a special kind of torment given who made it up, she thought that Song might be underestimating Angharad. The Pereduri was not afraid to twist words to get her way, when she thought something was needed, and she’d not tried to usurp captainship of the cabal even when she had disagreed with Song’s decisions.

Within the circumstances of ‘Song being the commanding officer’, the laws of engagement would likely be quite different from the lines Angharad Tredegar would draw in the sand when it came to her personal life. And she’d proved she could put the job above her pride, in the countryside. It was no small influence on why Maryam had made her peace with the possibility of the Pereduri sticking around.

But all those things she had already said, and would not repeat them. If that bird was to take flight then it was Song that needed to take the steps by herself. To speak to Tredegar about her fear, to extend the trust. Anything else was just delaying the inevitable. And now that she had been a friend, she thought as she polished off the last of the seized cashews, she must be a cabalist.

“The Lefthand House,” Maryam said. “Leveraging her, you said. That’s a concern.”

And not something they could really do anything about in the immediate. Getting the Krypteia involved with the Malani spies would inevitably also mean getting them involved in the neighboring Yellow Earth situation, which Song desperately wanted to avoid.

“Something is off there,” Song frowned. “They are blackmailing her about her father, but for what? If the Lefthand House knew about her having joined the Watch, Lord Gule would not be recruiting her into the cult of the Golden Ram. If they do not know of her joining, then what is it they want from her?”

“The infernal forge,” Maryam suggested.