"All because the queen built those towns?"

"No! Where you been through all this, boy? Don't you know nothing?"

Calandria pretended to examine her boots. "It didn't seem so important to know about it, before the soldiers came."

"The queen, she knew about these oases in the desert for years. Never told anyone. We coulda moved out there, made a good living. She didn't care, she wanted 'em to house her damn perverts. So when Parliament found out about 'em they ask her what she's doing with 'em. She tells Parliament it's none of our business! Same time, she's asking for all kinds of money, extra taxes, from the nobles. She been bleeding us good folk dry, to feed her perverts!

"So Parliament demands she give the towns back. Stop making these pervert things out there in the desert. And she says no."

"She dissolved Parliament," said the Winckler.

"Know what that means, boy? She told all 'em nobles to get packing! She'd run the country directly." Maenin shook his head. "She wanted to turn us all into perverts! The towns were just the start. After them, the cities, who knows what we'd be having to say? All I know is I'll never take orders from no pervert."

"The nobles who make up the Upper House formed an army," said the Winckler. "They called on General Lavin to command it. Except he wasn't a general, then. He was from one of the old families, they gave him the job because he had pull."

Maenin stood up. "Shut up! The General's a good man. He's kept us alive right to the palace, and he'll keep us alive when we go in. We're gonna win, and it's 'cause of him."

The Winckler raised his hands apologetically. "You're right, Maenin. You are indeed right. To start with, the queen's army was bigger than ours. We licked 'em, and it was 'cause of the General."

"Damn right." Maenin sat down.

"How did you do that?" Calandria asked, trying to project boyish curiosity.

Maenin and the Winckler told how Lavin had predicated his campaign on knowledge of stockpiles the queen kept in the desert. Summer was traditionally the time for campaigning; in northern Ventus, war stopped when the snows came. Iapysia's southern desert remained warm, but the population was mostly concentrated along the northern border of the desert, and the seashore.

Lavin launched a phony campaign in summer, and drew the queen's forces on a long retreat along the oceanside. He had the navy on his side, so the queen's forces could not pursue his army too far.

Then he struck inland, and captured the desert stockpiles. When the end of the campaign season arrived, the queen's forces had exhausted their supplies, but Lavin's forces had several months' worth of grain and dried fish. They drove north, as the queen's forces suffered desertion and attrition. By the spring of this year, they had taken two-thirds of the country. The queen retreated to her summer palace, and Lavin marched a small force into the desert to clean out her experimental towns, and strike at her palace from the south. That force had encountered no resistance, and arrived here sooner than expected. The queen's forces were engaged west of the palace by the bulk of Lavin's army. He had no time for a decent siege of the walled summer palace. Lavin would have to throw them against the walls in a day or two, or face the retreating royal army.

"It's okay, though," drawled the Winckler. "He's got a plan, as usual."

Maenin squinted through the roiling wood smoke. "What? What plan?"

"Haven't you heard? He's going to meet the queen tomorrow, to get her to surrender. If he does it, we don't have to fight at all. The war will be over!"

"Shit. Really?" Maenin shook his head. "That'd be something. Be too bad, though, I kinda wanted to taste one of those noble ladies she's hiding there. The perverts were no fun. They had no spirit. I want a woman who'll try and claw my eyes out!" He laughed, and the others joined in. Calandria showed her teeth.

They speculated for a while about how well the noble ladies would perform, and even the queen if they should catch her. They teased Cal for being a virgin, and promised to show the boy how to rape if they had to storm the palace.

Cal expressed her gratitude.

Maenin yawned. "Fine. Sleep time. The bastards 'll wake us up before dawn, and the Winds know what'll happen tomorrow. Where you sleepin', boy?"

"By the fire," she said quickly.

"Wise." Maenin glared at the Winckler. "Stay in sight, that's my advice." He stood, stretched, and walked scratching to his tent.

The others drifted away over the next hour, leaving Calandria to tend the fire. The supply of wood was meagre, but she built the fire up anyway—not because she was cold, but because she had a use for it.

When she was confident she would not be interrupted, she rummaged in her pack and brought out a slim metal tube. She uncapped it and poured a few small metal pills into her hand. She arranged these and peered at them in the firelight.

There was fine writing on the flat beads. When she had found the one she was looking for, she put the others back in the tube, and dropped the chosen one into the center of the fire. Using the tip of her sword, she maneuvered it onto the hottest coals at the core of the flames.

From another pouch, Calandria took some rusty metal rivets she had found on the way here. She dropped these into the fire near the metal bead. Then she sat back to wait.

It would take a couple of hours for the seed to sprout and grow, but she couldn't afford to nap. If someone came, she would have to distract them, lest they look into the fire and see something impossible gleaming there.

Lavin ignored the glares of hate that followed him. He and his honor guard of two were safe, he knew. Galas would never let him come to harm. So as he walked he did not look at the soldiers ranked on either side of the narrow courtyard that led to the citadel, but cast his gaze above ground level to examine the damage his siege engines had caused to the buildings. The defenders had hung bright banners across the worst of it to frustrate such scrutiny; the festive cloth looked incongruous against blackened stonework, above the pinched faces of grim soldiers.

He felt more optimistic than he had in weeks. Galas had agreed to parley. Now that her situation was hopeless, she was finally seeing reason. This madness had to stop, and there was no reason it should end with deaths, hers included. All the while she hid in her fortress, and he threw men and stones at the walls, Lavin had been in an agony of fear that some one of those stones would find her, or that dysentery would run through the palace, or her own people assassinate her to escape. He couldn't live with the thought.

But he couldn't live with the thought of anyone else being in charge of this siege, either. She would lose; he had always known that. There had never been any question of his joining her cause, because all he could do for her was delay the inevitable. He might win her admiration and love, but she would be brought down at last, and he wouldn't be able to stop it.

This way, the outcome was in his hands. And though she might hate him, this way he might save her.

In his late-night conversations with Hesty, Lavin had lied about all these things. He had claimed to hate Galas, and the fact that he hated the things she had done leant credence to his words. But it hurt him to talk so, and he often wondered if Hesty saw that, and doubted.

Maybe it would all end today. The thought was uplifting, and he had to restrain himself from smiling. To smile, while walking through the ranks of the enemy, would be cruel. Lavin did not think he was a cruel man.

He ran his gaze across the battlements anyway, measuring for weaknesses. All responsibility lay on his shoulders, after all; he had won this far because he was able to plan for hard realities without flinching. If Galas rejected his ultimatum he would need to know what walls to throw his men against.