“You may have lost me somewhere in there,” Gavin said. He thought he followed, but it was rarely a mistake to make an enemy think they were smarter than you.

“Because you stopped the war, Gavin. And then you wiped out the pirates. Several times. And that’s without crediting you for taxes falling because there was no longer a war to finance. One way or another, Gavin Guile, your family cost me my father, my last uncle, and four distant cousins.

“But from my calculations, I owe you somewhere between four years and twenty-three days, to twenty-seven years and sixteen days. Years of my labor. Years of my life. You’ve saved me perhaps a thousand thousand danars; you’ve allowed me to reestablish my family, and by stopping the Blood War, you have certainly saved me the blood of many people I love. I want to kill you so badly that my stomach aches, and I’ve been getting the kind of headaches that would bring an empire low just thinking about you. I am well-known, perhaps famous, for dealing straight. I’ve never cheated anyone, though it has been in my power to do so for quite some time. But how does one balance blood?”

“I leave a complicated legacy,” Gavin said drily.

“One balances blood with blood,” she said.

“Oh, that was a rhetorical question,” Gavin said. “But you seem both far too grim and far too elated at my suffering to be about to say, ‘Gavin, you’ve saved lives I love, so I will save yours.’”

“Whatever else you are—and you are many things, Gavin Guile—you’re not stupid. Did you hear about the Battle of Ox Ford?”

“I was so busy … felt like I was stuck rowing in endless circles. Missed it.”

“The Chromeria lost fifty-five thousand men in one day. Thirty-five thousand of those were Ruthgari. My people.”

Gavin felt like he’d been kicked. “What happened?”

“General Azmith thought to crush the Color Prince against the Ao River.”

“The Ao? That river’s not that deep, is it?” Gavin asked.

“Deep enough, during the wet season.”

Gavin had only seen the river in summer.

“The general tried to catch the Blood Robes as they crossed the ford. Their wight-drafters drafted new bridges within half an hour, encircled our armies, and crushed us against the river instead. The Blood Foresters hated the plan, and had sworn to withdraw, but General Azmith wasn’t moved. He went ahead without them. So the Color Prince invaded Blood Forest, and Blood Forest lost no one, while my people took a blow from which we may not recover.”

My people. She said it not as a native daughter, but as a leader. She must own Satrapah Ptolos outright. But that wasn’t the worst of it. With the battles of Ru and Ox Ford, the Seven Satrapies had endured two military disasters in a row. Even with the riches of Ruthgar, a satrapy could only stand to lose so many lives.

“Nor have things gotten better. After Ox Ford, he split his armies and sent half up around the headwaters of the Ao, trying to cut off their supply lines.”

That was a long trip, and a long time to be without half your army. Gavin would have sent small parties across the river to raid, not half his army.

“General Azmith entreated Raven Rock to hold out, told them that he would save them. They held, but he got there too late. He fled in disarray, leaving behind cannons and gunpowder, and whole wagons full of rations and muskets.”

“Clearly, there’s only one thing you can do,” Gavin said.

“And what’s that?”

“Free me.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Because I win battles. Because if you want to keep track of debts owed in blood, then the Color Prince owes you most dearly.”

“I don’t know about that. I think the blood debt is yours.”

“Mine?” Gavin asked with real incredulity. “How could those lives possibly be put on me?”

“You let this war happen. You could have stopped it in Garriston, or long before then.”

“What? What?! Everything I’ve done I’ve done to stop this war! How bad are your spies if you believe anything else?”

“You’re a liar, Gavin Guile. They all agree on that.”

It was one thing to be killed for your sins, many as they were. It was something else altogether to be killed for the very thing you’d been trying to stop. He tried another tack. “Do you remember your number, in the lottery?”

“One fifty seven. Everyone remembers their Orholam-damned number. Two days with that damned thing folded in my hand, wondering if it would mean my death.”

The lottery had been a furious young Gavin’s way to end the interminable Blood War. Only the leading families of both sides had been given numbers. Two thousand of the richest and most connected people in Blood Forest and Ruthgar had been gathered at Gavin’s command. His Blackguards had apoplectic fits at the very thought of it. Not that that stopped him.

Gavin had invited them all to the hippodrome to pray for peace. Attendance was not voluntary. No drafters were allowed in except those who were members of the families, and Gavin’s Blackguards had relieved each person of larger weapons, though knives and the like for personal defense had been allowed, allaying their suspicions. The heads of all the families understood you didn’t want swords and ataghans and spears when you gathered bitter enemies in one place.

Each family had lined up in a column according to their number. A random number, so they thought. Felia Guile had helped Gavin decide who should be in the front ranks. She’d also helped with the deception itself: Gavin had marked each folded slip of paper with a superviolet number as each person dropped it in. Felia had worn Lucidonius’s superviolet spectacles around her neck, though no one knew they were that, and fewer still would have known what those spectacles did. With her head bowing as if in prayer each time she reached into the bowl, she’d look through the spectacles and grab out the appropriate paper.

It worked for all but one family, who had swapped their folded papers. Younger, and angrier, Gavin had merely shrugged and said, “They want to lie to the Prism? Sow the wind.” His mother knew how the saying ended. She’d acquiesced.

With the columns of families facing him in a circle, with only the lowest number from each family standing in the narrowest circle, facing Gavin, he had gestured to a large circular wooden table he’d placed on the raised spina with him. He had led a prayer for peace, some drivel he didn’t remember. After they’d all agreed to his sufficiently abstract and non-binding words to Orholam, bobbing their heads and making the sign of the seven, he’d gestured to that rough-hewn round table beside him. “My friends,” he said. “Here sits the table of peace. In the blessed light of Orholam, who will join me at it?”

One family, the Blue Bells, had sent their mother forward. The Blue Bells had once been numerous and fierce. Now they were a shadow. Two daughters, two distant cousins left, and not much land, no riches. They were within a breath of being commoners or being extinct.

Everyone else looked to their lady or lord, banconn or conn.

Gavin said, “I think you all don’t understand. Your war has stripped your lands bare. It has soaked every field in unclean blood, with each act rivaling the next in baseness and inhumanity. Your war is an affront to Orholam. All this you know, but your bloodlust is greater than your shame. You daren’t ask forgiveness for your atrocities because then you might have to extend forgiveness for your enemies’. Your bitterness is a boil on your faces, obscuring your sight. So every year, you send a tribute of your sons and daughters to death, so you can continue your foolishness and pride. And every year, you send a far greater tribute of those who have been pulled in the wake of your impiety, your blasphemy, your arrogance. You have not only insulted Orholam; you have insulted me. You have not only robbed your own families and your enemies’ families and the innocent, you have robbed the Seven Satrapies. You have had satraps and, yes, even Prisms come to you and to your fathers to stop these wars. You have responded with temporary truces and lies. Lulls in which you rearm and breed, picking sons and daughters based on who might be the strongest drafter, who might have the most colors.