There is no answer to that, but no trace of humiliation or offense will show on my face. I keep my head high and my eyes forward, as Mother taught us girls to do.
We approach the huge gate with its sentries, lamps burning as the purpling twilight sinks into the full darkness of night.
“Kal, take that cursed scarf off your face. The guards need to see an uncle and his nephew on their way to a joyous wedding feast, not a prince skulking about playing at banditry.”
Kalliarkos tugs down the scarf so it wraps only his neck and leaves his face visible. As we come to a stop, he hands the guards a piece of fired ceramic with a cipher stamped on it, giving us permission to leave the city. Inarsis pulls the curtain out of my hand and shrouds us behind it before the guards can get a close look. So have my mother and sisters been cut off from everything around them. I clasp my hands in my lap and, trembling, wait out the crossing, but quickly enough we are allowed to pass under the triple gates and over a wide plank causeway that spans the canal that rings the city.
Beneath the wheels the grind of wood turns to the rumble of stone as we roll onto a paved road and head out of the city into the countryside. Inarsis ties the curtains up out of the way.
The Royal Road follows the coastline of Efea from Saryenia all the way to the easternmost fortress at Pellucidar Lake in the mountainous Eastern Reach, a journey that takes weeks. At night the road is lit with sturdy glass lanterns fastened to pillars. Iron cages posted at intervals contain the remains of dead enemies scavenged off the battlefield and left to rot. The bones of those the king has defeated are ground to dust and, so it is said, mixed into the goat’s milk drunk by King Kliatemnos the Fifth every morning to strengthen his blood.
“What do you mean to do now, Uncle?” asks Kalliarkos. His raised chin and brusque tone give him a lordly arrogance that makes him seem a stranger, not the amiable young man who first spoke to me on Lord Ottonor’s balcony.
“Must I do anything? Can I not enjoy this lovely ride through the countryside on our way to your sister’s wedding feast?”
The view here just outside the city is not that lovely. Regimental camps sprawl alongside the Royal Road, each surrounded by a wall. Every gate has a company badge painted on it: a looped cross, a triangle finned with two bars, a hatched circle. By these marks soldiers can know their own company and form up again in the disarray of battle, so Father taught me. He praised me for memorizing the name of every regiment in the king’s army. I see some of them now: the Striking Fours, the Bronze Blades, the Old Spears.