“More easily than I’d thought, in truth. It might well have been harder in peacetime, but war is still familiar, for good or ill. Or it’s so heavy itself as to make other burdens seem light.”
I’d be inclined to the second. I slept beside you for a while, after all.
“You were very kind.”
Among other adjectives.Gerant’s mental voice held an echo of lust, or the memory of it, as faint as a drop of wine in a flask of water. Then it vanished and he went on, sympathetic.Even when you didn’t wake, you rarely looked easy.
“I dreamed less when I was young.” Fear in the moment had been sharper then, and starker, but command strained the nerves with an unrelenting pressure. “The fighting was easier too, and not only physically.” Amris thought of the woman he’d given directions to earlier, and the fear on her child’s face. “If someone’s already a soldier when you come to love them, you know the risk you’re taking, and a child of such parents grows up with it, but when war comes to civilian doorsteps… It will be very sudden to those we’re training, and to those who love them.”
I never had the heart to take up with another warrior, after you,Gerant said.In those times, that wasn’t much protection, but you’re right. I had the choice.
The moon shone in through the tall windows, making narrow lines of silver on the floor and across the thin beds. “I hope,” said Amris, breaching the topic gingerly, “I hope youwerehappy, after I vanished. You said you were past eighty when you died, and—”
That would be an ungodly length of time for grief-stricken chastity, yes. And I was happy, as much as the circumstances would let anyone be. I found someone five years later—but you only have to know as much of that as you want.
Amris leaned back and thought about it. “The lecture notes,” he said, a joke between them that his tongue still knew well.
In his head, Gerant laughed softly.Well, then. He’d been a potter, and a sculptor, before the storms. He helped to craft a few statuettes that I needed for magic. We stayed lovers until I died, he perished a few years later—we were of an age—and we raised his sister’s children. She didn’t survive one of the storms.
“Ah,” said Amris.
Yes, I miss him, said Gerant, who’d learned to read his silences far too well.But I miss many people. It’s a part of my state. I expect the list to grow until my work is done—if it ever is. I’m glad,he added,that I can stop missing you for a while, however different our circumstances are now.
“I’m glad I didn’t have to miss you,” said Amris, still on unstable ground. He hastened to clarify. “Not to say that I wouldn’t have you back in your body, had I the choice, or have spent more time with you then. But you’re here. Your form doesn’t change my love.”
Nor mine,said Gerant.You know that I never stopped thinking of you, or loving you, even with Dominic. It just took different shapes. Love always does.
“It does indeed. Now—” He raised his head to take in the bare room and the moonlight outside. “I’m only starting to find my way here, though gods know I may not have time to do more than start. I’d have been utterly lost without you. I don’t wish to part again, not more than briefly, if we all survive. Still, I don’t want to hinder you and Darya about your duties.”
I won’t leave you either. Darya…Gerant thought it over.She does work alone, generally. Unless I count. Most men have no chance of changing that. You might be the exception, and not only because you’re tied to me.
* * *
“Things shaped like we are,” Emeth told the owl. It perched on her wrist, fluffing violet wings and listening with that particular owl tilt of the head. She gestured with her other hand, pointing to the north. “But coming from that way.”
Her voice was higher and sharper than normal, though not enough so that a stranger would have been likely to notice. Darya had noticed at first, but now took it as fact, and accounted for the sound and its echoes as she listened for others.
At night, the edge of the forest was still loud, as bugs, bats, and birds all tried to mate with or eat one another. Darya knew those noises well, though. Different ones would stand out.
Her horse, placid and plump, continued munching nearby leaves as Emeth spoke to the owl again. “Come this way when you see them.” Another wave of the hand indicated the direction they’d come. “Big stone place. Find a person. They’ll find me.”
With her free hand, she stroked the owl gently on top of its head. The multicolored eyes blinked in contentment, and the bond that made the animals remember her request set itself. Darya had seen the same process with a badger and a fox already that night.
As the owl flew off, she said, “Pity you can’t get them to fight for us.”
“If there were wolves or bears nearer here, I might,” said Emeth, with no trace now of her earlier teasing, “or if we met a greycat by chance and it didn’t kill us before I could talk. But they won’t come to my call, and the smaller creatures will hide from anything as large as the Twisted, not fight.”
“Smart of them,” said Darya.
“If you only think about the moment. Now,” and her voice dropped, became whuffly and braying, “everyone stand still and be quiet.”
The horses froze. Darya froze. Emeth was silent as far as human ears went, but she threw her head back in the pose of one calling out, with her mouth open wide, and Darya saw the muscles of her throat moving.
She stopped and sat upright. Darya began to speak, but Emeth held up a hand, and that was when Darya heard scores of small wings flapping above them. She tilted her own head up and saw the colony of bats just as it descended.
They perched on any and all convenient surfaces. That meant Darya too. Tiny claws clung to her sleeves, her boots, and her hair. She looked sideways into a black-velvet face with tiny eyes. Individually, the bats were cute, which didn’t keep her from feeling like a statue in the middle of pigeons. Her horse, which didn’t care anything about cuteness or missions, was shifting uneasily beneath her as Emeth’s instructions struggled with its instincts.
Talk fast, Darya thought at her friend.
