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BOOK ONE

The Seduction of Tragedy

So THEY LUST FOR BLOOD POETS KNOW ITS TASTE, BUT SOME KNOW IT better than others A few are known to choke on it Stand at a distance, then, and make violence into a dance Glory in its sounds, in the mayhem and those stern expressions that seem better suited to an unpleasant task completed with reluctant forbearance There is for the audience that glee of ad sword, the perfect thrust, the cold, professional face with the flat eyes Revel, then, in the strut, and see sorim camaraderie of failed men and women—

Failed? You say many do not see that? Oh dear

Shall I then offer up the reek of shit and piss? The cries for loved ones far away? The hopeless longing for a mother’s eentle slowing of the ha heart? Shall I describe the true faces of violence? The twist of fear, the heaviness of dread, the panic that rushes in a surge of blood, a surge that drains the visage and bulges the eyes? But what value any of this, when to feel is to acknowledge the frailty of one’s own soul, and such frailty er that so rip

Indeed, I would think ar free the helm’s strap, let your scalp prickle in the cool air Strip down until you stand naked, and let’s see again that swagger

There are poets who glory in their recounts of battle, of all those struggles so deftly ritualized And they tend lovingly their garden of words, heaping high the harvest of glory, duty, courage and honour But each of those luscious, stirring words is plucked from the same vine, and alas, it is a poisonous one Name it necessity, and look well upon its spun strands, its fibrous belligerence

Necessity The soldiers attack, but they attack in order to defend Those they face stand fir war in self-defence Consider this, I beg you Consider this well and consider this long Choose a cool dusk, with the air round Draay fro sun, watching the night sky awaken above you, and give your thoughts to necessity

The hunter knows it The prey knows it But on a field of battle, when every life totters in the balance, where childhoods, begun long ago, and youthful days suddenly past, have all, iht This wretched span of killing and dying Was this the cause your father andyou, protecting you, feeding you, loving you?

What, in the na here?

Necessity, when spoken of in the forum of human endeavour, is more often a lie than not Those who have laid claim to your life will use it often, and yet hold you at a distance, refusing you that tinition If you come to see the falseness of their clai behind the true virtues of courage and honour – they make you drunk on those words, and would keep you that way, until comes the time for you to bleed for them

The poet who glories in war is a spinner of lies The poet who delights in visceral detail, for the sole purpose of feeding that lust for blood, has all the depth of a puddle of piss on the ground

Oh, have done with it, then

ONE

STEPPING OUT FROM THE TENT, RENARR FACED THE BRIGHT ht, and did not blink Behind her, on the other side of the canvas wall, thebitter co at the children to hurry with the hot, spiced wine Within the tent, the air had been thick with the fug of loveone, the metallic bite of the oils hich the soldiers honed weapons and worked to keep leather supple, the breaths of drunkards and the faint undercurrent of vomit But out here those s her head

as she watched the camp stir awake

She took coin no different froh she did not need it She made her false ry, and when they shuddered, e weak and childlike, she held them as would a mother In every way, then, she was the same as the others Yet they kept her apart, forever pushed away frohter of Lord Urusander, after all, Legion Coht, and this was a privilege worthy of dreams, and if flower petals were scattered in her wake, they were the colour of blood She had no friends She had no followers The company she kept had all the warmth of a murder of crows

There was frost silvering the tufts of grass between the tents and the ground was frozen hard underfoot The s like confusion about the heads of the soldiers as they readied their gear

She could see, in their agitated gestures, in the nerves betrayed by fu at buckles and the like, and could hear, in the surly tones of their conversations, that many now believed that this would be the day A battle was co of the civil war If she turned to her left, and could h the hillside to the northeast, through the unlit tuain into the ht, she would see the camp of the Wardens, a ca these snow-burnished skins and hair now the hue of spun gold And in that other ca from the coast Rend

The day felt reluctant, but in an ironic way, like a woh hands pushing her thighs apart, the air then filling with its share of harsh breaths, ecstatic runts And when it was all done with, amidst deep pools of satisfied heat, there would be blood on the grass