It was on a whim I took up a shovel and began to dig the firepit, but once the steel bit into the ground it felt right. Like I was doing something I could pour all of my mind into, enough to forget the blood-soaked day I’d waded through to get here. I’d not thought twice about where I began to dig, simply choosing somewhere relatively out of the way since I well knew there could be no hiding place in a military camp, and instead busied myself with the labour of it. Mantle of Woe tossed aside into the dirt, sleeves pulled up and hair held in bun, I shovelled clumps of dusty earth.
Vivienne was the first to come.
I didn’t hear her approach – Princess or not, she was almost as light footed as when she had been the Thief – but I felt eyes on my back and turned to find her standing at the edge of the pit. She looked as tired as I felt, her pale green tunic hanging limp on that slim frame. There was still a sense of regality to her, though. She was not wearing the circlet that had become her right after she was raised a princess of Callow, but the loops of the milkmaid’s braid gave the same feeling. Her face, though still sharp, had matured enough that her blue-grey eyes no longer seemed almost too large for it.
She looked like a queen in the making, a princess forged in the crucibles of the long wars we had spent half our lives fighting. There were days where looking Princess in the eye still drew complicated feelings out of me, but this was not one of them. Sweaty hand resting on the handle of my shovel, I found that today I found only pride. We made it to the end, the two of us, I thought. Caring about anything else just seemed unforgivably petty.
“You know,” Vivienne Dartwick said, “even back when we were enemies, Catherine, that was the thing I admired about you.”
I cocked an eyebrow, leaning my weight against the shovel.
“What’s that?”
“You never balk at being the one in the pit,” the Princess said, eyes unreadable, “getting your hands dirty.”
I brushed a bang out of my eye, unsure how to respond, but in a blink of my eye she’d gone. Not for long, though. The Princess of Callow came back with a shovel of her own, that standard-issue tool of wood and steel of the Army of Callow we’d taken the Legion pattern for. She leapt down into the hole, brushing her arm against mine, and took up a place at my back. Neither of us felt the need to talk, reluctant to break the comfortable silence of people who’d learned each other deeply enough not to feel the need to fill every void. Instead we dug together. It was easier work with two pairs of hand on it, one of those simple little truths that cast a broader shadow than they should.
Indrani came second.
“Wait, I have something for this,” Archer mused, looking down at us from the edge of the pit.
“I feel as if am I about to be disappointed in many ways,” Vivienne noted.
“Something something royals holding big shafts?” Indrani tried. “No, wait-”
She chortled.
“Royally shafted,” Archer triumphantly exclaimed.
“Huh,” I said, then flicked a glance to my side. “I might have to start calling you Prophet instead of Princess, Vivi.”
“You barely even call me that,” she muttered.
“I know,” I sagely replied. “Won’t even take much effort.”
We might have kept at that for a while if a pile of dust hadn’t been kicked in our faces. I covered my eyes – both of them, out of habit – even as Vivienne began to cough and spit out the bits she’d swallowed. When I looked up, I found the afternoon sun shining at Indrani’s back as she scowled at us and wagged a finger.
“Don’t flirt when I’m trying to annoy you,” she chided us. “It’s rude.”
“I feel like no one ever taught you how to flirt and we’ve all been paying for it ever since,” Vivienne told her.
Wow, I thought, sending her an admiring glance. That’d been a little savage.
“’Cause you’re known as a great mistress of the subtleties of seduction, Dartwick,” Indrani skeptically replied.
Vivienne cocked an eyebrow, then turned towards me. She leaned close hand coming to hold my neck from the back, and even as she pulled me close she dipped me down. This was, I mused, embarrassingly close to a daydream I’d entertained once or twice back in the day.
“Catherine,” Vivienne gravely said. “Let’s slay your enemies in battle, drink too much table wine and then ignore important paperwork to have a tryst on your desk instead.”
I blinked, then turned to shoot at a look at a befuddled Indrani.
“She’s hitting all the right notes,” I admitted. “Damn, maybe you should learn from her.”
Indrani scowled and kicked dirt into our faces again, which alas had the mistress of seduction dropping me unceremoniously so she wouldn’t be made to eat dirt quite literally for the second time. Though this was a foul betrayal I recovered from the disappointment and got back to my feet, just in time to see Vivienne smugly smiling at Archer – who seemed unable to decide whether she was irritated or amused. It was a good look on her, brightening the hazelnut eyes her darker skin and green scarf already made pop out. Indrani had always been beautiful in moments, those stolen heartbeats where she was so incandescently alive, and between the sun and the smirk pulling at her lips this was one of them.
It passed, and I reclaimed my wits.
“So what’d you come here for?” I asked. “It better not be kicking earth back into our firepit, ‘Drani, or I’ll be cross.”
“Been going around getting my hands on bottles since you got the ball rolling,” she said, “but they’re running out and no one wants to sell theirs anymore. I need your seal to crack open you army’s last crates.”
I grunted, not entirely surprised that I wasn’t the only one intending to drink myself insensate tonight. It’d been a dark day and tomorrow didn’t look much brighter, plan or not.
“Take whatever you need,” I shrugged.
“Already tried that,” Indrani idly said, “but you changed the lock. Tell your phalanges to help, would you?”
Wasn’t hard to find one of the adjunct secretariat’s officers looming around – there was always one kicking about wherever I ended up, a habit Hakram had instilled them – and I got that sorted, sending Indrani back on her way. By the time I returned, Pickler had shown up. She was pacing around our pit, muttering under her breath, and almost ran into me. Her head would have reached higher on my body than I cared to admit.
“Have you started talking to yourself?” I asked. “Because they don’t let you get away with that without there being talk until you’re a priestess, in my experience.”
“Yes, yes, all hail the Crows,” Pickler dismissively replied. “May the Matrons perish trying to bite a chunk out of them, preferably after I’ve gotten good seats to watch the whole thing.”
“Your faith is touching, Sapper-General,” I drily replied. “I’ll pass the word along.”
“You do that,” Pickler told me, then poked my chest with an accusing finger. “Did you know your pit’s half a foot too deep and nowhere near large enough? We’re cooking pigs, not digging a tunnel.”
“We’re not finished yet,” I defensively.
“I was just following orders,” Vivienne called out from below, the treacherous weasel.
“You should have taken the engineering classes at the War College instead of that useless stuff you picked up instead,” Pickler told me.
My brow rose.
“Tactics and Strategy?” I drily asked.
“Yes, those,” the goblin told me, undaunted. “Haven’t tactiqued or strategized your way into digging a proper firepit yet, have you Foundling?”
I opened my mouth to object, then closed it. I raised a finger, tried again, then my teeth clicked closed under Pickler’s satisfied yellow gaze.
“Just tells us how to dig,” I finally sighed.
“An hour late, but there’s only so much you can expect out of humans,” my Sapper-General allowed.
“I’m going to write you up for discrimination, High Ridge, see if I don’t,” I muttered under my breath.
We were nearly done making something to Pickler’s satisfaction when Aisha showed up, legionaries carrying cart of firewood following in her wake. I took the opportunity to drag myself out of the pit, wipe my face with a cloth and guzzle down water from a skin. I was even generous enough to pass it to Vivienne afterwards, though not so generous I didn’t do that by throwing it at the back of her head. The noise it made hitting her was most satisfying. Aisha watched me with laughing eyes, her lovely heart-shaped face pulling into the hint of a smile.
“Juniper’s gone to pick out the pigs herself,” she told me. “She’d having fun dickering with the Fourth’s quartermaster for Vale hogs.”
Famously the fattest meat in Callow, which had me salivating already.
“Archer’s handling drinks,” I said, “but have we got anything except the meat on the way?”
Dark eyes moved to study me with sudden intensity.
“Kilian,” Aisha said with deliberate nonchalance, “offered to get a cauldron of dirty rice going.”
Rice mixed with oil, onions, tomatoes and up to half a dozen other ingredients depending on where in Praes the recipe came from – apparently Wolofites added bananas while Aksumites swore by ginger. Mind you, it was the dish that had her looking at me like I might be on the verge of biting her nose off. Kilian hadn’t been at one of these since we’d parted ways, at first because she’d declined invitations and later because I’d stopped asking. I honestly wasn’t sure how I felt about her trying to get a foot back in now, but I didn’t have the heart to refuse her. Not tonight of all nights.
“That’ll do,” I nodded. “Remind her to get the cauldron here early. You know how territorial Juniper gets when the pigs are on spits.”
“It’s rather endearing,” Aisha agreed with a fond smile.
Not exactly what I’d been getting at, but uh – good for her? I finished the pit to Pickler’s exacting specifications and then left her to haranguing legionaries into putting the firewood in the right sort of stacks, helping Vivienne out with a hand that she’d didn’t particularly need.
“We could probably use a wash,” she said, taking a sniff at the both of us.
I wiggled my eyebrows.
“Trying to impress anyone?” I teased. “Thought you were one of those chaste maiden kind of princesses, Dartwick.”
“I’ve thought about it,” she admitted. “There are some men I could see myself taking to bed with an assurance of discretion.”
“Might be our last night,” I quietly told her. “We have a chance, Vivienne, but there’s nothing certain about this. Take your comforts where we can.”
She smiled at me.
“If it is my last night,” Vivienne said, “then I would rather spend it with the lot of you then with a stranger. It’d be a greater comfort than a lay, however pleasurable.”
“You say sweet things, sometimes,” I smiled back.
“You really need to bathe,” Princess then told me, wrinkling her nose.
I sighed. I couldn’t even blame her for that entirely. I’d trained this into all of the Woe, because… I blanked. There must have been a reason at someone point, I reassured myself. Surely. I was still desperately trying to recall what it might be when I took my friend’s advice and began to limp towards my tent, where I was due a wash and a nap.
I woke half an hour before dusk, pleasantly refreshed. I splashed my face with tepid water to finish clearing out the last dregs of sleep, then pulled on a clean black tunic and took the time to sit and massage my bad leg for a while. It wasn’t throbbing as badly as I’d thought it might after the battle I’d been through. It could have been-
Get them all home, Catherine.
My stomach clenched. My throat was dry. And a heartbeat later I dropped my leg with a hiss of pain, the marks on the skin where my fingers had dug in red and visible. I’d forgot, just for a moment, why it was I’d gone to dig a pit. My friend was dead. Roland had been taken by an arrow that had been meant to kill me. Why else the poison that reacted to Night, the very power I would have called on to lessen my wound? Akua had been shot too, and there had been no poison in her. With the Varlet destroyed last year and the aspect that had made this thus lost, it was likely too rare to be used any way other than sparingly. Neshamah had meant to kill me and come so very close. I need to be better, I thought, fingers clenching. More careful. To see the next one coming.
Or else more friends than Roland de Beaumarais would get killed trying to keep me alive.
I put on the Mantle of Woe, more for the comfort of its weight than a need for the warmth, and slipped out of my tent. It was a childish thing, to flee the place where the dark thoughts had come, but I indulged them impulse anyway. I didn’t feel like talking with the two phalanges that began to walk behind me, or with anyone at all, so I briskly turned a corner and pulled down a veil of Night to cover me. I shook them off, limping deeper into the Army of Callow’s camp, and let the noise of my soldiers wash over me.
There was a frenetic energy to the camp. It wasn’t quite despair – we’d taken a licking today, but we’d still gotten deep into the city before retreating – but it was a cousin of sorts. Every last of my soldiers knew they could die tomorrow. Some of them remembered dying today, saved only by a Titan’s will. No one wanted to be alone tonight, or leave things undone they might never get the chance to finish. Stashes of liquor and smokes were being blown through, grudges being settled or set aside and then the opposite of grudges: more than a few of my soldiers had snuck off into dark corners to fuck with someone who’d caught their eye, or even simply someone that was there. It felt like the aftermath of a summer fair, only without the good singing voices.
There was some theatre though, I found.
Some bold souls had decided to spend their last night in Keter’s shadow putting on a trick play, which had drawn a large crowd of legionaries in varying degrees of inebriation. The Barber and Edward play was putting them in a fine mood, and it was loud laughter that’d drawn me there in the first place. I stood at the edge of the crowd, listening in, and found the premise hadn’t changed. It was still about the cunning goblin sergeant Barber, whose beauty drew suitors like moths to the flame, and the grim squire Edward whose strokes of good luck always ended unmade by his need to get even with his enemies. As was customary, between the two of them they got in a lot of mockery and dead foreigners which was exactly the kind of play my soldiers were in the mood for.
I was still taken aback by the sheer fucking audacity of it when I saw a goblin with bones glued on try to get to Barber to read her poetry only to get his head cut off by Edward – only for another bone-wearing goblin to pop up at the edge of the stage and try again. Those were, I realized with a shocked grin, the fucking Dead King.
“I would love you forever, beauteous star without a rival,” the goblin Dead King crooned.
“Not even if I were dead,” Barber scathingly replied.
Edward cut off Neshamah’s head again, wiping his brow exaggeratedly afterwards.
“We’ve been at this all afternoon,” the squire complained. “Maybe you should reconsider the suit, Queen Barber has a ring to it.”
Barber, who had not known the Dead King had a kingdom before, then hatched the plan to marry him and immediately bump him off so she could inherit Keter. It devolved quickly into slapstick humour as a bunch of heroes tried to crash the wedding only for their attempts to kill the Dead King to get in each other’s way and prevent Barber from speaking the vows. I was halfway to leaving when I noticed that the priest that had been about to officiate the wedding was suddenly dragged off stage, replaced by someone with a fake beard. Someone with a staff and a tattered cloak of many colours. The goblin Dead King peered at ‘me’.
“Have I met you before?” he asked. “You seem familiar.”
“Never,” the Black Queen replied. “Unrelated, but do you have any particular weaknesses someone might use to kill you for good?”
The Dead King’s yellow eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“Why do you ask?”
“It’s part of the traditional Callowan wedding ceremony,” the Black Queen lied.
Two goblins dressed in black popped in behind her, cawing their hearts out as they flapped the wings of large wooden crows that they made perch on the Black Queen’s shoulders. She batted them away in a panic.
“Coincidence,” the Black Queen assured the betrothed. “I must have had some seeds on my cloak.”
The crows kept coming back, though, forcing her to make increasingly tortured explanations, and with a grin I pulled on Night. The next time the crows flew off, I replaced them with two feathered apparitions I’d woven out. The Black Queen actress stiffened and the crowd stilled.
“Nothing to see here,” I made one of the crows say.
“We have invitations,” the other one insisted.
The sound was so sudden it was like a sharper had just blown: the roars of laughter approval drowned out everything else, a quarter of the crowd looking around to see if they might find me. I was gone before anyone got too enterprising, though, disappearing into the avenues.
I had a fire waiting for me.
Most of them were already there when I arrived.
Juniper was turning her spitted pigs and loudly arguing with Vivienne about whether ‘catapults’ could ever be legitimately be an item in a royal budget, though I couldn’t help but notice that unlike the way it would have been a few years ago the two of them were smiling. Aisha and Masego were playing shatranj as they sipped glasses of wine, Indrani draped over his shoulder and giving him terrible advice he was duly ignoring, and Pickler was halfway through a mug of ale larger than her head as informed the lot of them that goblins had a game like shatranj, only the rules changed and you could get stabbed if you lost. Indrani looked worryingly interested.
The sight that had me shuffling in discomfort, though, was Kilian of Mashamba leaning over her cauldron of dirty rice with a long spoon in hand as she calmly spoke with Akua Sahelian. I’d never seen them together before, and hadn’t quite grasped how much taller than her Akua was – Kilian was barely taller than me, after all. I slipped in close before I could get noticed and got to eavesdrop a bit on the conversation.
“- and Ratface used to put saffron in it by the handful, which was odious,” Kilian was saying. “He was a deft hand with chicken dishes, but not a man you wanted anywhere near rice.”
“We have a family recipe with fried peppers in it,” Akua told her. “A few generations back, one of my kin actually had another assassinated over-”
Golden eyes found me, and I forced nonchalance as I approached them. Kilian looked hesitant when she noticed I was there, her fair face closing, so I limped closer to lean over the cauldron and breathe in the vapour.
“Smells good,” I said, clapping her shoulder.
I would have lied if it didn’t, but I hadn’t had to.
“Rat Company recipe,” Kilian replied with a relieved smile. “They used to teach us in our first year.”
I blinked in surprise.
“I never was never taught it,” I pointed out.
“I would surmise you also never had to cook, darling,” Akua amusedly said. “Did you not become company captain within days of first joining?”
“It was Ratface’s idea,” I pointed out, perhaps a tad defensively.
“Of course it was,” Akua easily smiled.
I narrowed my eye at her, only then noticing the startled look that Kilian was giving the both of us. It left me feeling strangely naked, so I excused myself to grab a drink instead of lingering. The strangeness quickly faded, leaving me instead to sink into the warmth of the company I was keeping. I spent most of my time bickering with Indrani about whether or not some poet I’d never head of should be considered a classic – absolutely nod, I’d never heard of them – and stealing pieces from the shatranj game that Pickler had insisted she would beat Aisha at since she’d beaten Zeze. Since the good lady Aisha Bishara ensured my glass stayed full, in an act of brazen quid pro quo I ensured that her pawns never stayed more than two turns off the board when they were taken.
It got bad enough Masego started to cheat against her, which naturally drew Indrani into it and therefore utter chaos.
I was grinning up to my ears by the time Juniper declared the pigs were ready, a signal that the traditional ritual was about to begin. We all gathered with our plates as the Hellhound began making her cuts, as usual beginning with the naked favouritism that was Aisha getting the first place the best pieces. Masego cocked his head to the side.
“Why is it that she always goes first?” he curiously asked.
Juniper turned a gimlet eye on him.
“She’s the only one of you lot that removes headaches from my life instead of adding them,” the Marshal of Callow growled.
“Oh, that seems fair then,” Zeze plainly agreed.
As usual, the use of Masego’s most dangerous weapon – sincerity – disarmed his opponent without contest. Not so much that she didn’t slap Indrani’s hand away when she tried to carve out a piece from the side of the pig, though. Still, looking at them all I could not help but feel something was slightly wrong. The last time we’d done this, in Hainaut, there’d been… Ah, I thought. There’d been Hakram. He had been invited, Gods of course he’d been, but he was also the Warlord and our camp was not the only one lit up tonight.
“Ah, just in time.”
I turned and coming out of the cold were two silhouettes. One I did not recognize, an orc with long fangs and scarred-up shoulders bared by the leather tunic she had on. Big girl, shorter than Juniper but noticeably broader. The other one, though, was a prayer I’d not voiced answered. Hakram stood easily on his prosthetic leg, a loose coat fur over his tunic, and offered me a smile.
“I don’t suppose you have two more plates?” the tall orc asked.
“I think we’ll find some lying around,” I smiled back.
“Sigvin!” Indrani called out. “Though he might drag you here. Come on, sit with me.”
Ah, so that was who. Sigvin of the Split Tree Clan was, if Archer was to be believed, the closest thing Hakram had had to a lover in the time we’d known him. They didn’t keep to each other’s bed only, she said, but she was sticking around and he didn’t seem to mind at all. Bet it had something to do about the scars, I mused. I still remembered how wild orc girls had gone over his after he scrapped with Vivienne and the Lone Swordsman. Sigvin’s face betrayed no nervousness, but there was something of it in her stance. There were, I supposed, a lot of famous names gathered here tonight. She stepped forward, though, and after offering me a curt bow pressed two bottles into my hands.
“Aragh, Warden,” she said. “A gift for your fire.”
I met her eyes solemnly.
“Where have you been all my life, Sigvin?” I asked.
That got Indrani laughing, and Aisha as well, which bled some of the tension out. Hakram shot me a knowing look as he passed me by, gently brushing his shoulder against mine in unspoken thanks. I sat with him, Akua by complete coincidence happening to sit on my other side as Juniper finished doling out her cuts and we settled down to eat. With full bellies and plenty to drink, we settled down around the fire and the conversation remained lively. I let myself be drawn into a debate by Vivienne about whether or not the Exiled Prince would have been able to beat the Barrow Sword in a fight-
“Absolutely not,” I firmly said. “Ishaq’s ridiculously hard to kill and he can even use Night now.”
-but afterwards I took step back for a bit, pulling up my pipe to indulge in wakeleaf as I watched them. It was a balm of the heart to see them like this. Masego idly playing with Indrani’s hair as she rested her head on his lap, Pickler drawing something in the dirt that Aisha and Sigvin were look rather skeptically at, Juniper looking appalled as Akua told her about secret Tower histories and both gestured animatedly in the firelight. Vivienne was chatting with Kilian by the pigs, the redhead tracing a few symbols of light in the air that the Princess was shaking her head at. Slowly, I felt something loosen in my gut as I pulled at my pipe and blew out a stream of smoke.
“I missed these,” Hakram quietly said.
I’d heard him coming, but we had kept silent until now as I watched and smoked. There was no sense of hurry to the air.
“I’m glad we got to do it before the end,” I murmured. “It wouldn’t be the same, going into the dark without first having sat by the fire.”
He slowly nodded. I was seated and he standing, the two of us apart from the rest. It was a familiar feeling, though somewhat bittersweet.
“Tomorrow,” he began, then trailed off.
“There’ll be the battle,” I said. “And then after. When that time comes…”
“I’ll find you,” the Warlord said. “I can still feel it, you know.”
I glanced at him, found his face pulled tight.
“The pull,” he elaborated when I said nothing.
My lips quirked.
“And this surprises you?”
He did not answer, which was as good as an admission it did.
“I told you, Hakram Deadhand,” I said. “When the Woe will fight, where would you be if not with us?”
I meant it, I did not speak out loud. You’re still one of us. He stayed silent for a long time.
“I will not be the Warlord forever,” he suddenly said.
“You’ll need to step down eventually,” I agreed. “Else they won’t know how to be without you in charge.”
He nodded.
“When that day comes,” Hakram gravelled. “I-”
I raised a hand, interrupted him.
“Don’t feel like you have to make that promise,” I said. “Wasn’t that the point of all this?”
“You should have let me finish,” he snorted, baring fangs in amusement. “I could think of worse places to retire to than Cardinal.”
It wasn’t quite an offer, I thought, or a promise. But it was something. There was a lump in my throat I couldn’t quite swallow, so instead I took his hand. The dead one, the skeletal fingers that he’d come into fighting for me. I squeezed them and he squeezed them back. I sighed, closing my eye, and for a moment allowed myself to lean my head against his side and rest. It wasn’t the same it used to be, I thought.
But that didn’t mean it couldn’t be good.
When it all wound down, when everyone was drunk and began to fall asleep around the dying fire, after Hakram and Sigvin had gone, I still sat wide awake. Vivienne was snoring under a blanket and drooling on a log, Pickler draped over her and somehow not awoken by the racket. Juniper and Aisha were whispering softly in a corner, Indrani had gone off to get water for an unusually dead drunk Masego to drink before he fell asleep and I found myself with Kilian of Masham standing before me. She had not grown any less beautiful in the years since we’d parted ways, I thought as I watched the paleness of the moon caress her skin and light up the green of her eyes.
“Thank you,” Kilian softly said. “For saying yes.”
I could have pretended I didn’t know what she was talking about, but it would have been unworthy of the both of us.
“They’re your friends too,” I said. “I wouldn’t keep you from them on a night like this.”
Her lips quirked in a rueful smile I knew well.
“And us, Catherine?” she asked. “Are we friends?”
I could have told her that I’d once offered her that and she had turned it away, but the bitterness of that would have left a poor taste in the mouth. It was a done business, done long ago at that.
“No,” I honestly said. “But that’s the choices that were made.”
She nodded, and I found her face hard to read.
“I suppose we aren’t,” Kilian agreed, then glanced at the others. “It’ll get cooler out, later on.”
I cocked my head to the sight. Her eyes found mine, steady.
“It would be warmer in my tent,” she offered, and I stilled.
We both knew what she was truly offering, and it would have been a lie to say I wasn’t at least a little tempted. She had, after all, not stopped being beautiful. And I had fond memories of her behind closed doors, for all that had come after. But it was only a passing thing, soon gone. It was, as I had just thought, a done business. Pretending otherwise would be sweet, for a time, but it would be a sickly sort of sweetness.
“I’ve gotten used to the cold,” I gently replied.
To my surprise, she smiled.
“I didn’t think you’d say yes,” she admitted.
I cocked my head to the side.
“Then why offer?”
“The terror of an entire continent,” Kilian teasingly said, “and still some things about you are the same as when you were fresh out of Laure.”
I was still in too good a mood to get irritated, but she was headed in that direction.
“For old time’s sake,” Kilian said, “I’ll tell you one thing, Catherine.”
She paused, then looked away.
“You never looked at me the way you look at the Sahelian,” the redhead told me. “Do yourself a favour and own it.”
She raised her hand to touch my shoulder, but she must have seen something on my face and she aborted the gesture. With one last faint smile, she took her leave and left the cast of the fire’s light to vanish into the camp. I sat there, resting my cheek on the palm of my hand, and sighed.
“Eavesdropping?” I said.
A moment of silence, then a smooth gait on the dirt until she came to sit by my side. Close enough to touch, yet not touching. Years made into a sentence, that.
“You started it,” Akua replied.
I rolled my eye but did not argue. We were both had bad habits in that regard. The silence that lingered after was not tense, but neither was it easy. It felt like the moment before a blade was drawn. And in the end, it was not me who cleared the scabbard first.
“Will you?” she asked.
“Will I?” I replied.
Golden eyes found mine.
“Do yourself a favour,” Akua said.
My fingers clenched, then slowly unclenched. I did not answer.
“No,” Akua murmured. “I don’t think you will. There’s too much of who you are invested in holding that last redoubt.”
I did not look away.
“So you won’t,” Akua slowly said, “but neither will you stop me.”
Her hand cupped my cheek, tenderly, and she leaned forward. I closed my eye, felt her lips move against mine. It was soft but the softness kindled a hunger, and I would have bitten her lip and leaned in had I not held on to that last redoubt. But I did, she leaned back. Her breath was soft against my lips.
“I am not sure,” Akua whispered, “whether that was love or cruelty.”
My eye still closed, I felt her rise to her feet. She brushed her hand against my neck, my shoulder, and then suddenly the warmth of them was gone.
“Neither am I,” I admitted.
She was gone when I opened my eye.
I stayed there for a long time, sitting there in my silence.
Though it was late and the night was at its deepest, I did not crawl into my tent to sleep. Instead I rose and slipped past the sleeping bodies on the floor, past the people I loved most in the world, and headed deeper into the shadow. Past the last fires to be lit, the last watching eyes that a twist of Night ensured slid past me without seeing anything. I did not have a destination held firmly in my mind, instead trusting my feet to get me where I needed to be. One of the old Fairfax kings had once said that the evening before a battle was like an entire nation breathing in, and I felt the truth to the words. For all that the camp had gone still and silent, there was palpable sense of something in the air.
But we were still in the moment before the end began, and so there was room enough for one last conversation to be had.
I found her waiting in the shadow of a watchtower, leaning against the side as a slice of moonlight cut across her face. The Ranger had been beautiful once, and perhaps still was, but that beauty had been marred. She still held the burn scars of Summer flame on the side of her face, but also fresher ones. Still red and raw, three cuts: one across the nose and two down her cheeks. The parting gift of her last pupils, the children of Refuge that had risen against their terror and teacher. They’d left her broken on the floor of the Tower as goblinfire burned behind, her fate entirely in her own hands. We’d all known, deep down, that it would take more than that to kill her.
I limped forward, Mantle trailing behind me as the moonlight shone down on my hair, and the half-elf’s dark eyes flicked to me even through the veil I had yet to cast down. It was no longer needed, though, so with a flick of the wrist I abandoned the working.
“I’ve been expecting you, Hye Su,” I calmly said.
“I did not,” the hard-eyed woman said, “give you leave to use my name.”
I hummed, unmoved, and cocked my head to the side.
“ “But the Name you want me to use instead,” I said, “isn’t it feeling a little loose in your grasp, nowadays?”
I felt it then, the will to kill me. An intention so strong it felt like Creation would bend to it, just like the first time I’d met this monster when I’d been a girl who didn’t known better. I did now, though. And I was no longer that girl. I leaned forward, smiling, and pit my will against her own. For a moment it was as if two ships were colliding, but then in the heartbeat that followed there was a crack. And it was not me that’d given. Ranger drew back into herself before it could turn worse, face giving away nothing, but her body was not so silent. She was, I found with amusement, wary.
How long had it been since she’d come out the loser in a game like this?
“Better,” I mildly said. “Now make your offer. It’s why you came for, isn’t it?”
She pushed off the side of the watchtower, the slice of moonlight expanding to swallow half her face. How very unfair it was, I thought, that she was beautiful enough the cut on her cheek seemed more like a tattoo than a blemish.
“I want a trade, Warden,” Hye Su said. “An oath out of you.”
“And what manner of oath would it be?” I asked.
I already knew the answer, but it needed to be said.
“A duel,” she said. “You and me. Ten years from now.”
I thinly smiled.
“Am I to rejoice,” I asked, “that I have become worth hunting?”
Her face tightened with sudden, poisonous anger. It startled me.
“No,” Hye Sue coldly said. “Not that. Never that, for you. This isn’t Ranger business.”
Ah, I softly realized. It wasn’t the Named that had come tonight, the legend. It was the woman.
“You want to kill me,” I said.
“If you die now Calernia might break,” she said. “And if it’s just after the war, it’ll be more trouble than it’s worth. So I want an oath that, ten years from now, you will come to me for a duel to the death.”
I breathed out a laugh.
“Indrani didn’t think you’d take revenge,” I told her.
“He did it to himself as much as you did,” she said. “I know that. And that it’s not a good fate in the making, killing you. It’ll bring too much down on my head.”
“But you don’t care,” I slowly said.
I was, I would admit, fascinated by the cold flame I saw in the other woman’s eyes.
“But I don’t care,” Hye Sue repeated, the quiet of her voice a deep grief. “I loved him, Warden, in a way that can’t be replaced. That time won’t change. I loved him and you killed him. So in ten years, one of us will die.”
Looking at her, at the gaunt cast of her face, I believed it at last. That in her own strange and twisted way, Hye Su had loved Amadeus of the Green Stretch just as deeply as he’d loved her. Enough that she was breaking the rules that’d kept her alive through centuries of fighting Named and monsters, enough that she was willing to risk being hunted by entire kingdoms. This might just be, I realized, the first time I had ever liked the Ranger since first meeting her. I clenched my fingers, then unclenched them.
“You said this was a trade,” I reminded her. “Should I take this oath, what would you offer in exchange?”
She met my eye, unflinching.
“I know,” Hye Sue, “a secret way into Keter. Take the oath and I’ll show it to you.”
And there it was, the last piece that’d been needed before it all fell into place. Before we brought an end to this endless war. I stood before her, our silhouettes draped in moonlight, and after a long moment I offered my hand. She took it, fingers digging into my wrist, and we shook on it.
I gave her the oath and she gave me a way past the impassable.
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