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By the third day, Liv realized what the prince had been betting on The freed h now clothed and unbound, had no food The Color Prince’s foragers had denuded the land of crops and livestock No one would beat the freed men, but no one would feed them either Of course,the slaves was seen as the best way to cure lustfulness and laziness They could deal with the pain of an empty belly For a while

There was no traffic on the roads except other slaves, so there was no one to rob even if they wanted to One s off with food, but not horses They’d been hunted down, tied up, sprayed with red luxin, and set afire alive As three days turned to four, large groups began traveling parallel to the slow- army

On the fifth day, at dinner, thousands ca more Free , thousands more were at the drills

By the tenth day, twenty-two thousand e numbers of untrained, undisciplined men to an already undertrained and undisciplined are proble late into the night about it, even raising their voices to the prince Should the slaves be put into their own units, or incorporated into existing ones? (The latter) What was to be done about slaves who accosted women or men in the camp? (Immolation) The slaves were all men, and only the camp overseers and their favorites--who’d all fled--had been allowed to visit the prostitutes in Thorikos Could anything be done for theether representatives of the slaves, his generals, and the prostitutes--who hadn’t been organized in any sort of a guild, but did so rapidly when they were told that they could thus make a fortune Liv’s ears burned as she listened, but the prince never asked her to leave He got the Mother of the Companions, as the prostitutes wished to be called, to tell him how many clients their women could serve in a day He had two-thirds that many chits made up, made of bronze, each stamped with a lewd act Then he made up a much smaller number of silver chits that could be used for the best Companions--he left it up to the Mother to decide how she wished to choose those woenerals, a third to the head of the foragers, and a third to his bursar

Chits were to be given toinfor particularly hazardous assignenerals At least half of the chits had to be distributed to slaves, and if there was any corruption in hoarding chits or dispensing them only to favorites, the corrupt ed, and immolated Then, every day, the Companions would turn in the chits for reimbursement The last third could be purchased by anyone in the ar offset the subsidy for the others

The prince said, "For the next teeks, I want you to do your best to find ways to give out as many of these as possible, and not to the same men over and over Give everyone a chance to earn one After that, we’ll scale back We don’t want riots or rapists this week, but we don’t want financial ruin next week either"

The next day, it seemed the camp shrank by a third as the newly freed men went out on volunteer missions in every direction

As they approached Idoss, the towns got bigger and the loot got better None resisted until they were alion, had a stone wall, archers, a few drafters Liv couldn’t figure what the people of the city were thinking--Idoss, which ht be defended, was only a day’s trip away for a fa for your life But somehow the city elders had convinced themselves they could scatter a slave army like chaff

The headsman spat from the ramparts and instructed his archers to fire on the Color Prince when he came forward to parley The Color Prince’s drafters deflected the arrows easily

With drafters providing cover from the archers, their sappers--fores under the ithin an hour They blew open a hole and had the city in flaave orders for no quarter to be given This would be an example, he said He only wanted five hundred women and children left alive

The army went mad, and Liv stayed in the camp Even dressed as a rich drafter and well-known as she was, it wasn’t safe in Ergion for a woman alone She didn’t want to see what the freed ht, a hugely muscled man whose status as a former slave could only be noted by his sheared ear was allowed into the prince’s tent He bowed and presented a sack The city headsave him a handful of silver chits, looked hi the disfigured head oozing blood on the prince’s carpet, Koios White Oak si what a man will risk for a few minutes with the mouth of a talented woman"

Chapter 63

~Sareen Tap, orange Tap, yellow Tap, red and sub-red

I’ve been having these waking dreams Before the Guiles’ War had coiven an Ilytian dragon Everywhere she’d gone, the toy had bobbed along in the air above her, tied to her wrist with a string, never deflating in the twoSeven years old, and already she’d been training for two years Her voice had a purity that transfixed soldiers and courtiers alike, but as often as not she’d h town

Meena is dead She would have been twenty-three years old now She wanted to go to the Chromeria with me I told her no Of course, her o even if I’d asked Most likely I hadn’t tried Meena died in General Gad Dele, her body tossed down the steps of the Great Pyra with those of the rest of our family Fifty-seven dead at the pyrah those deaths were more pedestrian, somehow mattered less--at least to my people

I wonder if Meena would have beco until that butcher killed all h But evidently not enough of one

And now my tie, I study the red tent that is my cell

The battle for Garriston was to have been hts and separated froht to the death instead of joining the Freeing

Usef and I had fought on opposite sides of the Prisms’ War, the False Prism’s War, the War of Guiles One of my best friends from the Chromeria killed Usef’s first wife And Usef had killed her in turn Usef and I had ample reason to hate each other Instead, we’d fallen in love Two broken warriors tired of war

We’d chosen to ether All the veteran drafters had been broken into pairs, each arer All of us were close to breaking the halo, so whoever broke first would have their partner put them out of their madness And if she was left alive alone, each was responsible for ending her own life