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January 23 - January 24, 2025
Here and there firejelly burned below the waves as though small suns tried to shine in the deep.
I had seen goblins dead before, we all had. They do not rot, they just shrink and dry and harden. Flies want nothing to do with them, and only birds with great hunger will peck at them. Sharks will eat them, of course, but a shark will eat a wooden oar, I have seen this. Because they do not rot, everyone was bringing home dead goblins from the last two wars. They were popular exhibits in circuses. We have used many dead goblins in training, especially to make the war corvids hate them.
her next blows came, as fast as clapping.
I would not have wanted to fight her for blood. There was something of the animal about Inocenta.
The bird’s full name was Censerichu, because he was given to fart evilly and much, like a censer-boy swinging incense smoke, though this incense could be sold at no market.
The sky sat purple over a sea, finally calm, that lay like metal, or like mother-of-pearl. Clouds here and there. I am not a poet, like Amiel, but it is enough to say this sky deserved his words, not mine.
Nouva was beautiful, too, in her way. Not like a maiden in a flowered crown, not romantically, but in the way that the right tool is pleasing to the eye.
It was not yet called the Threshers’ War, because we were not yet down to sending farmers with flails to fall like wheat.
But that is what the gods are for, is it not? To lift us when we are broken, and to stanch us when we bleed faith.
Still, I thought, how could Pol do else but rise? He was so competent and strong. He was fair and truthful, and I thought surely such traits would be enough. How little I knew of the world.
They were fine to look upon individually, but when they were formed up and moving in a column, the best word for them was magnificent. If I close my eyes I can still picture them with their tar-black feathers giving off blue highlights and their great curved beaks and the breastplates they had learned to tolerate—even Inocenta’s Richu allowed her to strap him in. The breastplates shone that day in the strong sunlight. The spurs we had fixed to their heels shone as well, ten-inch blades they could kick an ox to ribbons with, I have seen this. One difference between these giant war corvids and
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Migaéd was, if I am honest, a very handsome man, though in the way that a person of experience will see through. His beauty was like fine paint on a building shot with termites. You know the sort. Always in debt, however much money he was born to, and in this case it was a fabulous amount. Always abusing the trust of some lover who anyone can see is too good for him. Your dog will not like him, and dogs are to be listened to in these matters.
To love someone well is to know their small noises, and to hear home in them.
most just wore the mask that one’s face becomes after too many outrages.
“Fah, he was thick through the arms and could really batter, the Bride knows, but he was impatient and hot, the sort that can be goaded into overreach or undone with footwork. He never learned to be the arrow relaxing into flight rather than the tense bow at full draw. He will do better with a poleaxe, splitting the little pricks like firewood. I would not like to fight him with a polearm in those hands. Are we sure his father wasn’t a woodsman, or, to speak as friends, a great horny black bear?”
yasht!!
Each season has its incense: myrrh in the spring, bergamot in the fall, sage in the gloaming. In the winter, pine. When the trade routes to the south were open, wealthy churches like ours in Braga, and perhaps this one, would be burning ylang-ylang in the summer; but I was to find out from my fellow soldiers that lavender and cedar were the summer scent in most churches—the more expensive herb only grew in far Axa, or in parts of Old Kesh now under Hordelaw. As a duke’s daughter, it had not occurred to me that the gods would smell differently to the poor.
It was now that our new commander opened her eyes, and even from some distance they reminded me of those of a carrion eagle, that great bird of southern Ispanthia that would drive vultures and jackals from kills and sometimes took dogs or small children. These were hard eyes, that had seen the carnage in the east. Patient eyes.
A painting of her in her youth hangs in the library, and it is possible to fall in love with Nera dom Braga just from this painting.
hipbones that could be made into axe-heads.
I saw myself in his great black eye, my face a mask of their blood. I saw the sun in his eye as well, weak behind clouds.
Drink stalks all of us in my household, but it seemed to have marked Migaéd, as a wolf marks a sick deer.
Everyone at table looked bored with this man except the Pragmatist. She was looking at him in a different way, as if she was wondering what military use she could put this vainglorious, indulged man to. Bait, I think. I believe she was wondering if she could use this man as bait.
Even just to be near my sister I feel safe, and respected, and that I am enough as I am. I know siblings must live their adult lives apart, but I would be content to be a close neighbor to her, and show her what I have written, and bring her black plums from my garden, as well as blueberry and mulberry—she has ever loved fruits of the blue or purple sort more than red or yellow. I would delight to see her teach sword forms to my children, to see if they might show some of Corlu dom Braga’s metal since I have only ink and nectar in my blood. I would be kind to any husband of Galvicha’s, even if
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“He is rumored to be an enthusiast of … what’s that school of poetry that describes the bittersweet, knife-edge remorse that comes to those who have done harm to the undeserving, some harm they cannot repay?”
Following this army in this summer of famine was like following locusts.
Exactly what his rank was I did not know, except that he existed, like Migaéd, in that twilight place of privileged lordlings whose chief power was immunity from consequence.
When a member of the family first begins to hurt you, they may choose from many weapons, all sharp, all sure to draw blood. The first cuts are the worst, though every cut will hurt, no matter how well you learn to hide it.
Inocenta, running to my left, screamed a war cry worthy of devils. Inocenta’s scream did something else as well. It made her bird Richu scream, imitating her, wanting to please her. Bellu, good boy, the best of corvids, sweet sweet Bellu, also screamed. I had never heard a corvid make that sound before, and I had not known they could. It hurt my ears, it was the voice of the goddess of death herself. I screamed, too. It felt right in my throat, it gave me strength. Now Gannet took it up, and Dalgatha, and Boxer. Soon all of our huge birds were shrieking to shake the pillars holding up the sky
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If Carrasque collapsed, this tower would fall first. I surprised myself by feeling not unease, but a thrill at the thought of such a rare and beautiful death. It is with such thoughts the Bride becomes dear to us.
But please know, daughter of the duke, that there is nothing romantic about being hunted or beaten, or starving, or abused. These are just the things we can expect here, in this world. Most of us. And those of us in the shit like to know that somewhere, someone isn’t in the shit. And every time I drink a good glass of wine or eat a pastry or bed a whore, or a priestess of Nerêne, I do it not with hardness in my heart toward those who suffer. I do it in gratitude that there is something besides suffering.”
Dal-Gaata would make an easy first target for him since many were fearful of her worshippers. It was said we began as opium addicts and ended as assassins.
Not half an hour into my first service, and here were infanticide, flaying, and vengeance after death. At the very least, Dal-Gaata was not boring. The same could not be said for the church of the sun.
Short life, bloody hand. To say this is to pray for skill and strength in combat, and to acknowledge and celebrate that one’s death will come sooner in return for this.
I readily confess that I do not know what percentage of what he says is true, and what is the ravings of a half-mad genius misanthrope for whom lying is a sacrament.
Coming, coming, her black sword leveled at me, her skeletal face, her black hair, black as the queen’s, riding out behind her impossibly long on the hot breath of the wind like a draft from a bread oven, her hair a wedding train her eyes just holes with nothing in them this was my forever this fear this failure this how the duke his daughter a smear in Gallardia a nothing, the nothing in Dal-Gaata’s eyes.
“I have now three bottles of a substance that will in no way render one who drinks a cup of it invisible for six to eight hours. I have given it to a goat, and I would show him to you to prove it works, but I cannot find this goat. The thing to do now is to try it on a person.”
It is easier for a Spanth to read Gallard than to speak it because these tongues are written similarly and share some words. But Gallards speak as though they have no bones in their faces.
GET FUCKED FRENCHMEN
To be loved by a man is to be issued a decree he has written in advance, and has presented to others; to receive a woman’s love is to have a very personal letter written on one’s body.
But no, such weathervane turns are not to be trusted. A drunk’s sorrow is more fragile than his wrath.
And my anger going into that fight was great, because fury was easier to keep in my hand than sadness. The sadness within me was so black and monstrous that, had I given it any leash, it would have taken my legs from under me. It would have driven me from the world into some dark place,
I would like to tell you that I found the body of my little brother. That I kissed his cool cheek to set him on his path. That I took a lock of his hair, and that I keep it in my pouch. But such goodbyes are rare in calamities.
I have no words to describe these seas of rage and grief and make myself understood, except by those unlucky enough to have survived one without whom the world loses color. The only things I could do to ease the pain of it were to study the ways of the Bride. And to drink. And to kill. I did all of those things. I do them still.
Do not seek to impress hard men with false martiality, for they know their own. Let soldiers scorn or admire you for what you are in truth. Do not be coaxed into rudeness when in the company of the rude. It is better to be thought dull by the vulgar than to be thought vulgar by those of consequence.
Drunkards give away too much in blood, treasure, and especially in words. Blood might be replenished, treasure rewon. Words can never be recalled.
Gallardian city women like artists in the way that they like cats. As long as we shit where we are told and do not fight with the other cats, we get petted. If we do not wake them up too much in the night, we can stay ’til morning. They even feed us if we rao plaintively enough and let them feel our ribs and cluck.
No one is so furious as a small man caught in a misdeed.
As much as you would like me to tell you more of this, I will not. Simply imagine it for yourself, and know that your imaginings do not touch its shadow.
I had shaped my opponent into the fighter I wanted him to be—one that was slower and scared for his legs.
I do not need to be loved as deeply as I love, and I do not need to speak of it. All I knew was that she remembered me in this moment. And one moment is all there ever is.
