Only when Adare finally saw the army moving, marching, rank upon rank of men headed north, did she realize just how crucial the Sons of Flame were to her goals. She had known it in her head, of course—it was her whole reason for coming—but she could see it now, hear it, feel it in the trembling dirt beneath her boots. Despite their dislocation and the partial collapse of their Church, most of the Sons had served their order for years, and found little difficulty falling back into the old structures of command, the lifelong habits of discipline that distinguished a professional fighting force from a rabble of angry men with steel in their hands. Adare could have seized the Olonian treasury and tried to raise her own army, but the men would have had no cohesion, no training, no experience working in units, probably no idea how to walk in a line without stepping on one another’s heels. As she marched north with the Sons, however, recapitulating in reverse her long miles along the canal, things went so smoothly that it was easy to forget that at the end of it, they would have to fight a battle. That at the end of it, prophets or not, they might all be dead.

25

Kaden could remember slaughtering his first goat, sliding his carefully honed knife along the neck as he held the warm, trembling creature beneath one arm. He remembered the way the hair parted, then the skin beneath, the pink flesh fresh and unblemished for half a heartbeat before the blood welled in a hot, wet gush and the legs went abruptly slack.

He was only ten years old at the time, but he remembered Chalmer Oleki standing at his shoulder, instructing him to lay down the knife, to take up the large crock for the blood, to hold it beneath the wound. “Blood and meat,” Oleki had pointed out. “A little bone. A little hair. But no soul.” He chuckled gently at the notion, a soft sound, like a stream running over smoothed rocks. He had shown Kaden how to gut the animal, lifting each organ in turn: “The heart. The brain. The belly. A creature is no more than this. You are no more than this.”

So, too, this man that Kaden was readying himself to kill.

It was surprising how easy it had been to create the opportunity. He stood in the darkness of the door across from his own cell, knife at the ready, and waited, counting down the final heartbeats, until the man came, carrying the trencher in one hand, the storm lantern in the other. When Kaden heard the door at the end of the hallway open, he closed his lids over his flaming irises and waited, listening, until the footfalls paused. When he opened his eyes, the guard was setting down the lantern, back turned to him.