As Amris expected, the package contained a square of hardtack and two strips of dried meat. “Thank you,” he said, and was about to protest when he saw Darya take another such bundle out of her pack and open it herself.
“I can hunt when we’re outside the city. Here, all we’re going to get is rats, and I don’t want to risk their meat in a place like this.” She held out a leather bottle. “Water?”
He accepted and washed down his first few bites of hardtack. It tasted just as good as it had a hundred years before; for all he knew, it could have been made in his own time. Outside, the purple sky turned black, and the shadows inside the temple became darkness, lit only by the faint silver light of the stars.
In that light, Amris looked at his rescuer—Gerant’s companion, the woman who fought monsters and talked of eating rat meat as though it was commonplace outside of sieges. She met his gaze evenly, and her eyes glowed in the dark.
“I’d not bring this up at mealtime, nor just before bed,” he said, “but I fear I can’t choose my time. What has happened to the world since I left it?”
Chapter 9
“Good question,” Darya said. “Big question. Um.” It was also a question a more forward-thinking person would have been ready for. She took a bite of hardtack, which was good for stalling while she chewed. “All right. I’m going to start at the beginning, and this is going to be pretty general, and there’s a lot I don’t know. Probably a lot even Gerant doesn’t know.”
“A first in both of our experiences,” said Amris. “Still, I’ll value what you can speak of.”
Darya took a breath. “When you took Thyran out of the picture, it made the storms hit their hardest, right then.”
That wasnotThyran’s plan,Gerant put in, all the more emphatic for the dismayed expression on Amris’s face, and Darya repeated his words as quickly and as strongly as she could.We may not have been able to stop the storms at all by that point. What we did—whatyoudid, was interrupt the building of energy.Darya felt him struggle to put it into words that nonmages understood.Those that came before fed into one another, and the whole effect was like drawing back an arrow. Removing Thyran, we forced the storms to loose when they were only half-drawn. Because of what they were, that was still enough force to damage, but it could have been much, much worse.
Some of the shadow lifted from Amris, but not by any means all. “How bad was it?”
“Bad.” Gerant didn’t add details. Darya felt him withdrawing from contact slightly, as he did when she took lovers or attended to other bodily needs. He didn’t go as far off, though, so she felt an echo of his memories as she spoke, filling in details they’d never talked about and she’d never wanted. “For a full year, blizzards worse than there’d ever been. Plants died. Animals died. People couldn’t grow anything, or hunt, and that wouldn’t have mattered because the cold would mostly kill you in minutes if you went outside.”
It was summer, and they’d had no meat to cook, so she hadn’t bothered with a fire—there was nothing to burn in the temple, in any case. As she relayed the story, Darya wished for one. The warmth would have helped with the memories, and she could’ve stared into the flames. She rubbed her hands against her thighs instead, watching her fingers, pale against the dark cloth of her pants. They made her think of the plants in the city, and of dead things.
“The priests and the wizards did what they could, multiplying food and giving people protection from the cold, but there were limits to their power.” Without thinking about it, she fell back on the wording of the official histories, as her tutors had told them to her when she’d been barely a woman. “And while Thyran’s armies had scattered, the monsters endured the storms better than most humans. Death made others. So did desperate actions, or vicious ones. There were many threats in those days.”
Amris was silent.
“Some fared better than others. It wasn’t as bad in the south, or in places that could get food from the sea. Hills blocked the wind, and that helped too. But my teacher told me, when I was training, that there were half as many people living then as there were in your day. That was fifteen years ago, after a couple generations of breeding.”
She didn’t say:They ate the food, they ate dogs and rats and horses, they ate the candles for tallow, they ate the bark off the trees and the leather of their boots.She didn’t say:By the end, many of them ate one another, and it didn’t help.
All of that had been history before: sad, and horrifying to think about, but distant, and so well known that neither she nor Gerant had needed to speak of it. Now, Darya saw blood on the snow, faces that were half skulls, bodies burning in the streets, and those who wanted to live unable to move away from the stench.
A hand—large, warm, and callused—settled on top of hers. Darya looked up into Amris’s face and managed a quick, guilty smile. “I think I’m supposed to be comforting you, considering.”
“You have, and will again, but—” He shrugged. “Shock and memory are each their own sort of pain, and they strike at different times. Just now, I have reserves.”
He was speaking to her and Gerant both, Darya knew, and she spoke for them both when she replied, “Thank you,” and laced her fingers through his.
“A year, you said,” he prompted her.
“Yes.” This part was easier. “After that, the storms started getting milder, and further apart. Winter’s still worse than it was, they say, and longer, but we have the other three seasons again. The wizards and priests developed some magical techniques, too, or improved on what existed—stored light, different crops, city defenses, that kind of thing. Travel is still very risky, though, especially when it’s not summer, and there are plenty of places like this.” With her free hand, she gestured around to mean the city, then rethought. “Not exactly like Klaishil, that is, but…lost.”
I’d already died,Gerant added, before we knew that Heliodar or Nerapis had survived, and it wasn’t until halfway through my first Sentinel that a person could trust a map for more than five miles.
Darya repeated that. “Most live and die no more than a day’s journey from the place of their birth, even now. The Sentinels are different, but we were made to be.”
“I recall your founding,” said Amris, “though not the swords. You were always intended as a”—he stopped himself from sayingbreed, obviously—“a force apart.”
“Good work, then,” she said.
* * *
In truth, Amris wasn’t sure how strange the Order was, at least not as represented by Darya. Her appearance aside, the quickness of her speech was alien, and the casual hardness she displayed had been rare in his time—though that had been his time, before half the world had perished—but in action, she felt like one of his own comrades, and he’d not hesitated before taking her hand.
Some of that was Gerant’s presence, but not all.
