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___A windy morning threatens rain, outside the upper room.
___The woman doesn’t mind. Any rain blown in, between the columns around the room, won’t hurt the clay; nor hurt the ink with which she etches—nor anything else in the barely furnished room.
___She would prefer a little rain today, she thinks. A little sun, to be sure; but rain would suit her better…
___The imperial woman begins the wide new page…

❖ ❖ ❖

___And so, I let Seifas play the part of a menial scout, as often as he wished. I hadn’t intended for him to actually lead his company anyway. I didn’t want the competition.
___Neither did I want to lead. I much preferred to command.
___I tolerated the two real leaders among my subcommanders, because they weren’t ambitious. And for other reasons.
___I do not care to speculate on what I would have otherwise done to them.
___I have no need to speculate.
___I know what I did do…

___…those memories sear me still.

___But, these things had not yet come about, when Seifas returned to camp one day with a stranger.
___“I need thirty krana,” Seifas announced, ducking lean and tall into my command tent. “I have purchased some sheep.”
___In fact, he had already ordered a squad to retrieve the carcasses. A rather high price for the lives of mere sheep; worth a week’s wage for two squads. And this money would not be returning through company vendors for recirculation.
___Yet, we did need the sheep.
___I almost ordered Seifas to just take the stupid sheep…!
___…but–something distracted me.
___He looked…different…from when I had seen him last.
___I nodded to Hud, the frail young man from Keryth who kept my books. He answered my nod with his own, sparely, gravely; and went to the chests to retrieve some silver.
___After all, I could always countermand the order later.
___Seifas continued his report: how he had found the unexpected herd; how soldiers from an unknown brigade had tried to take the sheep for themselves; and how a strange, fair man had faced them down.
___Seifas underplayed his own contributions to the fight. That was nothing new.
___He also, however, was standing straight and tall, with a vigor in his eye and voice that he had never shown before.
___Wonderful, I sourly mused—the juacuar had found a friend.
___By himself, Seifas was only an irritant. He helped to keep unruly soldiers in line; but he couldn’t sympathize with his troops. Which surely was fine with me—it meant he wouldn’t build a following.
___He probably would have been happier, as a permanent scout.
___But I didn’t want him happy.
___He irked me.
___I told myself that Seifas was a tool, thoroughly molded by his teachers in the Hunting Cry.
___This is what I told myself—but still his presence pestered me; for he had something I lacked.
___Seifas had a purpose greater than himself.
___I wouldn’t have minded, had his purpose been me. But, I knew I wasn’t his highest authority.
___Neither the Eye nor the Agents cared about us—this was clear enough in all that I could see. It even was clear in what I couldn’t see: for the klerosa were gone, and new ones were not being raised! Had their masters ever cared about us?—then where were the servants?!
___Gone, to the unseen—abandoning us to fight and die alone!
___Gone, and good riddance. I never had liked them anyway. Justice had to begin and end with me; or else I became a tool in the hands of another.
___But Seifas kept his sight on that unseen.
___And I, in turn, had kept him near me, in my twisted fretful way. Resenting him, and scheming.
___I would condition him to suit my self.
___I could have ensorceled him to sleep with me—that would have been conditioning indeed!
___Yet—I always found excuses not to do it.
___I wouldn’t admit my doubts to myself. Could I set my teeth into his soul? Or if I tried, would he draw me into that other world—where I refused to go?
___I might be mastered instead—to a man I did not understand, who would not ever try to understand me.
___Other men were willing to barter themselves to me.
___He would not. I feared that gravity, and that anchor.
___It is easy to say, the beast is not under the bed.
___It is not so easy, to prove it by sleeping there.
___How much more terrible is it: to deny and to test the things of light whose spears might slay one’s self—even with joy.
___I did not want to die. And his soul, which threatened to crush me if I prodded, I did not want to live.
___So.
___I had tried subtler things.
___Some simple words, here and there; a mention of this atrocity or that. Look, on the horizon—another village burning! How long, would you say, from the color…?
___And I had fancied I was succeeding, etching his soul, little by little, day and night, inducing him to compromise, to look the other way.
___To despair.
___I hadn’t known how successful I had been—until that afternoon, when he stood straight and tall in my tent, brokering foolish sums for stupid sheep.
___Now my hateful game was blown away!
___—and through my mind it flashed, how treacherous and how petty I had been…
___I swatted that perception firmly.
___Now the fool had a friend. I would have to nip this in the bud to start again.
___Then, Seifas stepped forward.
___I jerked in my seat, startled by my feeling, that he had heard my spite and meant to punish me—and frightened by my impression, that he would be right to do so…
___But, he had only drawn a small, flat purse, from a pocket on his belt. Out of it, he tapped some silver krana onto the table, where Hud was entering sums into the ledger. The younger man’s face didn’t change; but, I saw the respect in his eyes when he nodded sparely again.
___“Here!” I snapped. “Let us see this champion.” And I stomped to the flap—although not quickly enough to keep from seeing Hud, adding a couple of krana of his own into the pile.
___I snorted—and decided where this stranger would be put: gathering fuel from the pens. If he enjoyed the company of sheep so much, then let him try cattle as well! And let him discover, thereby, how fickle shepherdesses can be!
___Yes; I taught him that lesson well enough.
___But not yet.
___That sharp cliff must be descended; but not yet…

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Notes from the real author…

One of the things I tried to make clear originally in Portunista’s recollections of this time in her life, was that she was under an increasing amount of stress to hold onto what authority she had managed to gain, much moreso to find some way to increase her powerbase so she wouldn’t be overthrown (or even swallowed up and more-or-less enslaved) by one of the other wandering groups of refugees. She’s a talented amateur who has gone about as far as she can feasibly go, and she has recently seen what happens to talented amateurs under other people’s authority: they get chewed up as cannon fodder.

Unfortunately, when trimming booklength in preproduction editing, I sacrificed some of that detail. So it looks more like she’s being randomly hateful, when what she’s desperately trying to do is protect herself at any cost. Seifas scares her, but she needs his competency (not in leading the troops, because he isn’t a great leader, but in helping to scare them in line, and in scouting and actual fighting), but she doesn’t understand him, and isn’t interested in understanding (much less sympathizing with) him. Keeping him sullenly depressed means he won’t be thinking of ways of opposing her policies–which aren’t all that bad (as will be seen later) but she wants to minimize preliminary restraints in case she does want to do something morally shady later. Having a moralistic elite killer around would be dangerously inconvenient!

This chapter is hugely important in setting up a baseline for her behavior later: this is where she is when the story starts, so even if she improves to some extent there’s a serious danger she’ll go back to this and beyond. What she does later, for which she grieves so much in the future (and for which she’s writing her Testimony at all), fits back precisely into this mindset. (I already knew with some detail what that was going to be when I wrote the chapter, and I kept this chapter in mind when working out extra details later.)

I took the opportunity in passing to play a little with the concept of overlapping authorial perspectives, too: Seifas has no idea that Portunista was intentionally playing with him psychologically to keep him depressed, and Portunista has no idea that she had gone too far–she wouldn’t want Seifas to kill himself, because then he’d be of no use to her!

Speaking of “opportunity”, yes I based her name on the Spanish word for “opportunist”. Whenever I get around to Book 2, readers will learn this was a nickname given to her by her teachers, and what her birthname is (although I have to admit I didn’t bother inventing her ‘real’ name when writing Book 1. I figured that was something I could put off until later.)

As for “Hud”, the staff accountant from Keryth… I’m just going to say “heh” and leave it at that.