Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold [191]
She looked again, and recalculated: five still live.
There was a ninth here, but not a body. More of a . . . pile. A spear was driven into the ground behind the shambles, with Arhys’s disfigured head displayed atop the shaft, peering out sightlessly over the Jokonan camp. The once-ravishing eyes had been cut out by whatever fear-maddened soldier had sought revenge upon the emptied form.
Too late. He was gone before you got there, Jokonan. Her bare feet faltered over some root, and she gasped in pain.
Illvin, striding forward, caught her arm before she tripped and fell headlong.
“They bait us. Look away,” he instructed through clenched teeth. “Do not faint. Or vomit.”
He looked ready to do both, she thought. His countenance was as gray as any of the corpses’, though his eyes burned like nothing she had ever seen in a man’s face.
“It’s not that,” she whispered back. “I have lost the god.”
His brows flickered in consternation and confusion. The bronze-skinned officer, his sword out, gestured them along toward the far edge of the grove, though he did not force Illvin from her side. Maybe she, too, looked as though she were about to faint.
She thought Illvin’s judgment of baiting to be precise. If either of them had still concealed any uncanny power—or any strength at all—that display might well have drawn it out of them, in some furious, futile lashing at their complacent enemies. If she had been either a sorceress or a swordsman, she swore the prince would not have survived the smirk he had cast over his shoulder as she’d stumbled past Arhys’s remains. From a failed saint, the Jokonans were quite safe, it seemed.
“They meant to march Catti past that,” Illvin muttered under his breath. “Add it to their tally, and five gods grant I may be the one to come collect . . .” His eyes didn’t stop glancing from tent to tent, tracing the path of last night’s destruction, summing the condition of the men and horses that they passed. Thin silver tracks slid down his face, but his hand scorned to wipe at them, under the gaze of the few dozen jeering soldiers crowded up to watch their little parade. Ista did not know enough vile Roknari to translate the insults, though Illvin no doubt did. His dogged mutter continued, “They’re not preparing to strike camp. They’re preparing an assault. Are we surprised? Ha. One thing shows—they don’t know how weak we’ve grown. Or they’d be preparing for a romp . . .”
Was he trying to distract his senses from the Jokonan desecration of his brother’s corpse? She prayed the ploy might serve him. She tried to extend her own blinded senses for any breath of the god, anywhere. Nothing. Joen and Sordso had placed Arhys’s head along her path to be a symbol of her failure, a hammerblow of despair. I wonder if Arvol dy Lutez felt as bereft as this, when his dangling hair touched the water for the second time?
And yet the symbol turned beneath her enemies’ feet, for the reminder of defeat was also a reminder of triumph. A presence in an absence. Strange.
The god may be absent, but I am still present. Maybe this is a task for dense matter, to do what matter does best: persist. So. She took a breath and kept on walking.
They arrived before the largest of the green tents. One side was rolled up, revealing what appeared to be nothing so much as a portable throne room. Rugs were strewn thickly across the ground. A dais ran along the back, supporting a pair of carved chairs decorated in gold leaf, and a scattering of cushions for lesser haunches. The pious dark green of staid and stern maternal widowhood was everywhere, overpowering even the sea-green of Jokonan arms, and never had Ista loathed the color more.
Dowager Princess Joen, dressed in a different but equally elaborate layering of stiff gowns from when they had—five gods, was it only this time yesterday that they had met upon the road?—sat in the smaller, lower of the two chairs. Her woman attendants knelt upon the cushions, and a drab, moonfaced young woman