“Usually a few hours.” Darya resheathed her sword and wiped as much of the blood from her own person as was possible. “The cold doesn’t usually kill like that, though, and never when he’s hitting two at once with it. Either having two of us connected helped, in which case he might be back sooner, or he pushed himself harder than he thought he could because your neck was on the line, which means later.”
The worry line on Amris’s brow reappeared. “If he drew on such reserves, are you certain it did him no permanent harm?”
Darya tapped the emerald. “This would’ve chipped. Cracked, if it was really bad, though I’ve never heard of anything that severe. They’re a lot harder to hurt than we are, even with magic.”
“Does the reverse hold true? That is, should the sword or the gem come to harm, would the spirit within feel it?”
“Not the sword. They stay sharper longer than the normal sort, and they’re a little tougher, but they still have to be taken care of, and most of them don’t see active service for more than a couple decades without needing major repairs. A lot like their wielders, actually.”
“Had the Threadcutter’s martial servants chosen a different name for themselves, your order might have been Blades.”
“Best not to compete with them, though. Brr.”
“A fine assessment, though from a woman who spends her life with a disembodied spirit.”
“Gerant’s mortal. Obviously. Death changes your outlook, but I don’t think it gives you a god’s perspective. Not that I’d know, but… Well, you’ve met the Blades.”
Tinival’s followers were knights-errant. The Sentinels were hunters and, at need, guardians. Letar’s Blades were another matter entirely: few and far between, plucked from the trainees for the more common priests, they’d all been grim and silent in Darya’s experience, stripped of anything except their goddess and their mission. If the Sentinels were weapons, the Blades were vessels, and the goddess of death and vengeance was a terrifying thing to contain, even just a little bit.
Amris prodded the cut on his leg experimentally, then looked back along the path they’d traveled. “Perhaps we should see to our own welfare. Is there water ahead?”
“A spring, not so far off,” Darya said, relieved when her memory brought it forth. The claw marks on her chest were indeed beginning to sting, and though cleaning them wouldn’t do much for that, it would keep her from adding worry to irritation. “And we’ll have to wash if we’re to get anywhere near the horses.”
She wasn’t at all sure she wanted to, having seen the “horses” in question—but they had four legs and they’d go faster than she and Amris would afoot. If she’d ever had a chance to be finicky about her mount, this wasn’t it.
* * *
Amris muttered an apology to Poram as they approached the spring. Twistedman blood had an acrid, burnt stink and an unpleasant pallor. Given the choice, he’d have introduced no such thing to any innocent body of water, but given the choice, he’d have also not introduced it to his skin, or the world at large. He’d put enough of it into the soil in his day, gods knew, and would likely do so again before much time had passed, given what he assumed was happening somewhere in the north.
“We’ve delayed them again,” Darya said, and for an unsettling moment he wondered if the spell had her reading his thoughts too—but no, he’d been looking off in the direction that had sent them Thyran’s forces in the past, and from where they’d surely come again. “A little more expensively than with the bridge, though. Next time we’ll lose limbs at this rate.”
“I’ll make no jokes about things costing an arm and a leg, if you were setting me on a course for that.”
She laughed. “Wish I had been. Too tired.”
Perching on a rock near the water, she shrugged her pack off and removed her boots. Amris did likewise, unstrapped himself from his armor, and then hesitated.
The knife wound was across the back of his leg, below his knee. Rolling up his trousers would be sufficient, save that the fight had gotten blood all over his clothing. With his troops in the field, that would have been cause enough to strip and swim, using only a little of the time they’d purchased by eliminating the scouts.
A good many of the soldiers he’d led, or fought beside, had been female. Modesty didn’t enter into it.
Yet Darya sat there on the rock, eyes like the light shining through the leaves and body as supple as one of the saplings nearby. With the heat of battle still in his blood, Amris saw every strand of her hair, every graceful inch of her long legs. Even guilt couldn’t stifle his awareness much, or for long—and with her presence searing into him, the thought of being naked together made him feel as dizzy as looking down over the bridge had done.
“You go first,” she said, with an abrupt, rough clearing of her throat. “One of us should stay armed and on watch. In case.”
“Ah. Yes. Wise.”
Amris turned his back to her and began to undress, quickly and far more clumsily than usual. As he lowered his trousers, he asked, by way of distraction, “Was there much danger out here before?”
“Nothing too horrible.” Darya cleared her throat again. “That’s to say, mostly natural. Bears and wolves, though they usually have better prey. Greycats do think we’re tasty, and they’re around every so often.”
Water closed around Amris’s legs and up to his waist, blessedly cold. The scratches he’d received without knowing stung from the contact, while the cut on his leg sent a sharp pain all up and down the outside of his thigh. He muttered an oath.
“Chilly?”
“That as well.” Holding his clothing in a bundle, he ducked under the water, stayed as long as breath and temperature would allow, and then shot back to the surface. Even that brief submersion, without soap or sand, felt thoroughly cleansing: Poram’s pure water counteracting Gizath’s filth, perhaps, or perhaps simply the joy that came with ridding himself of three days’ sweat.
It reminded him of the cold that had destroyed the scout, and he turned back toward Darya. She was still on the rock, looking off in the other direction. “Keeping watch” was the most practical interpretation, but Amris suspected not the only one, and not only out of his own vanity. She, too, had fought recently, and nobody had suggested the Sentinels had become celibate.
