The Sainnites had still believed then that every winter in Shaftal would be their last. Any day now, they believed, they would conquer this land of stubborn farmers, and offer the subjected country to one of the lords of Sainna as a bribe to let the exiled soldiers come home. In the early years, none of them could have imagined that they would die of old age in a still‑unconquered land.
Clement drank the cold tea and half listened to Cadmar’s tedious account of the various bouts he had fought in the training ring that morning. Fortunately, Clement’s smaller size had always excused her from being the big man’s training partner. Though she often wished to pummel him, it was more likely to be the reverse: no one admired Cadmar’s acumen, but his prowess as a fighter was beyond doubt.
Cadmar began telling old, often repeated jokes that he had heard in the men’s bathhouse. Gilly finally looked up from his book and rescued Clement with a comment about the storm that was approaching. They argued amicably about whether or not this winter was lingering longer than the last, until Cadmar, impatient with any conversation that was not about him, dismissed her.
“Gods be thanked,” muttered Clement after the door was shut behind her.
However, she had nothing else to do. She had tended the flower bulbs that bloomed on her windowsill; her quarters were pristine, her uniforms clean and mended, and she had bathed herself and changed her bed linens only yesterday. That morning she had attended the gathering of the garrison’s senior officers, who were themselves desperate to create new projects to divert the soldiers from picking fights with each other.
They were all half mad with cold and confinement and the bad humors that move like evil spirits from one barracks to the next. But Clement doubted that anyone had more cause for wretchedness than she had. For five years, she and Gilly had conspired to keep a dreadful truth secret from everyone but Cadmar. And Cadmar sustained his own equanimity by listening selectively or, when that failed, by reshaping the inconvenient facts into a comforting new form.
The man was a marvel, really.
Clement started down the hall. She would take a walk before the storm confined her indoors again. At the front door, she found that the soldiers on watch duty had already taken shelter in the anteroom. “It’s gotten awfully cold out there, Lieutenant‑General,” one warned. Clement set her teeth and stepped out the door into the rising wind. By the gods, it was a bitter day! Surely, if the Sainnites had arrived at Shaftal in winter rather than in summer, they would have simply expired of cold.
Winters in their homeland, Sainna, had been little more than interruptions in the growing season. In Sainna there had been lush croplands, vineyards, fat cows in green fields. And there had been soldiers, fighting in the service of one or another bloodthirsty lord, killing each other over possession of one or another tract of land. In Sainna, Clement had been born in a child‑crowded hovel outside a garrison, and had never been certain which of the four constantly pregnant women had given birth to her. She regularly saw her siblings sold to soldiers, then one day was herself sold to a new mother, Gabian, who took her into the garrison to become a soldier. A couple of years later, their entire battalion was forced to sea, and they became refugees.
Clement remembered riding on her mother’s back as they ran for the docks with an army at their heels. She had been eight, or maybe nine years old. She did not know she was screaming with fear until her mother put her down on the ship’s deck and slapped her to make her be quiet. After that, a blur of seasickness, bad water and worse food, and a single clear memory of being brought above deck to see some gigantic fishes, bigger than the ship. Their ship had run aground on the rocky, inhospitable coast of Shaftal, and Clement arrived in her new land by being heaved out of a longboat and dumped onto the sand, along with several other children and a great pile of armor, weaponry, and supplies. One of the soldiers who rowed that boat repeatedly through treacherous waters so as to unload the wrecked ship of its supplies and passengers had been as a god to her: a big, golden‑haired young man whose great muscles gleamed with freezing spray, whose blue eyes glinted with joy when a jagged rock or towering breaker challenged his strength. That man had been Cadmar.
It had been high summer then, but the Sainnites had soon learned the bitter facts about Shaftal’s weather. Today, the wind felt sharp enough to trim the skin off Clement’s face. She pulled the muffler up to her eyes, jammed her hat down over her ears, and set out across the sand‑strewn ice. She walked briskly, giving every appearance of having a destination, exchanging greetings with the few soldiers unfortunate enough to have outdoor business. Most of the five hundred here in Watfield Garrison would be in the barracks, huddled together under blankets rather than using their day’s ration of fuel, grumbling, arguing, gambling, and telling each other the same worn‑out stories over and over again.
Clement walked a half‑circuit of the garrison. At the edge of a wasteland of snow, she perched on an ice‑encased stone bench and tried to imagine the garden that would emerge here in the spring. The flower bulbs she had inherited from her soldier mother were planted under this snow. That they would soon bloom seemed unbelievable.
The cold had taken hold of her very bones when the gray sky blithely began scattering stars of snow across her lap. She broke her own torpor by cursing the weather, and then, because it made her feel better, continued to curse as she walked, starting with her enemies, but not neglecting her friends and herself. She cursed everyone in Shaftal while she was at it, and everyone who had ever been born, and only stopped short of cursing the gods because her angry, snow‑kicking perambulation had finally brought her near enough to the gate that one of the guards might have noticed and been perplexed by her behavior.
The gate, just then being shoved open to admit a new arrival, contained the city beyond in an illusory cage composed of its heavy iron bars: the narrow street, the high, steep‑roofed buildings that seemed ghostly and restless in the falling snow. In those buildings, the people of Watfield did whatever they did–tirelessly busy, indifferent to weather, oblivious to the threatening presence of the garrison. Artisans, shopkeepers, builders, brokers–they worked hard, ate well, lived comfortably, and followed rules or laws that Clement simply could not comprehend, no matter how often Gilly explained them to her.
Clement walked over to the gate captain and pulled aside her muffler so he could see her face in case snow had obscured the insignia on her hat. He saluted casually–after five years it was generally known that Clement didn’t share Cadmar’s obsession with protocol–and said, “It’s a messenger from Han.”
“Han? That’s a journey of a good twelve days.”
“In good weather,” said the captain, “on a clear road. But it took this soldier some twenty days, she says. She sure walks like she has a case of frostbite. Here, you, soldier!”
The limping messenger blundered her way to the captain and made a vague gesture that might have been a salute. The captain said, “This is Lieutenant‑General Clement. You can give your message to her.”
The messenger peered at Clement, apparently snow‑blind, and asked hoarsely, “You’re Clement?”
Clement had once known every soldier in Han Garrison, but she did not recognize this woman. “I’m afraid I am. Have you got a packet somewhere inside all those clothes? Let’s get you out of this weather, eh?”
“Take her in the barracks,” said the captain, gesturing so Clement would know which barracks he meant. “They’re having a birthday party on the men’s side, if you don’t mind a bit of noise.”