Vivian slept on her right side, cheek pillowed on the crook of her arm, legs stretched out.
The sight of her stirred feelings more personal than comfort and more tender than lust. Silence had enhanced that closeness rather than detracted from it. After most of a day without speech, Olvir was better attuned to the quiet messages of face and body, as well as shifts in breath or the weight of footsteps. Blending into the forest, maybe, had brought them more in harmony with each other.
Night sounds went on outside the clearing. It was too early for the cricket choruses of high summer, but Olvir heard the rustling of small furred creatures, the peeping of frogs in the river not far away, and once or twice the hunting screams of owls. The moonlight shone on moving shapes in the undergrowth at times, none so large as to cause alarm, all passing quickly on to the business of wild things.
Olvir walked circles, stopped for a bit to let silence fall, listened, then resumed his circuit. He tried not to contemplate what could happen or could lie ahead or to wonder about his nature. He tried to be purely in the moment and alert to the ways it could shift. He didn’t manage it completely, but he came close enough.
Having Vivian at the center of his pacing helped.
Chapter 10
Sleep was a matter of balance. Four hours would keep Vivian going. Her reflexes wouldn’t appreciably dull until she’d spent a week or two on that schedule, and she could keep going past that. She remembered that from training, not to mention a few missions in her past.
Keeping it in mind when Olvir woke her an hour or so before dawn was difficult. The world was clammy. Trained as she was, she ached—a day-long walk used different muscles than months of fighting inside a stockade—and her mouth felt like a squirrel had died in it.
Oh well, she was alive to be disgruntled.
Vivian gave Olvir a quick appreciative nod and suppressed a grin as she watched him run a hand through his auburn hair, which stuck up in uneven places when he first woke her. Hers curled too tightly to present that particular issue, though she had to finger-comb a few pine needles out of it.
The world mostly broke down into a series of tasks. There were boots, and she put them on. There was armor, and she shrugged into that, too, doing up the fastenings on her leather jerkin with still-stiff fingers while Olvir rolled up the bedclothes and packed them away. They left the grass where they’d lain in turn a little crushed, but Vivian doubted that the best tracker could make much use of that. Smell was another story, one neither of them could particularly help.
Olvir’s wasn’t at all bad, she’d noticed. Granted, they hadn’t been in extremely close contact, but stench usually came off on blankets. Olvir’s had smelled mostly of leather and faintly of sweaty man, unavoidable but decently clean, so not unpleasant. They’d still been warm when she’d lain down too.
He would probably be warm if she leaned against him now, Vivian thought, glancing over to watch Olvir close his pack. There was the armor, of course, but she’d found she could ignore that with the proper incentive.
It would have been pleasant. Many things would have been pleasant.
She wished she’d taken an hour or two for any of them in the past. There had been moments, after battle or late at night in taverns, when she could have reached out and drawn Olvir closer to her. Vivian didn’t think he’d have objected—but it had always seemed too momentous, too fraught with the potential to change the nature of their friendship.Perhaps another time, she’d always told herself.
Now she knew he housed a piece of the Traitor, they were in the middle of hostile territory on a mission to gods knew what end, and they had no time to linger.
Her past self had been a fool.
Packed and ready, Olvir came up to her side and gestured to the road, then to himself, then in the direction that they were going.
After a moment to figure it out, Vivian nodded. It’d be better to switch who took point. Different positions, when possible, kept people alert. She made her own gesture, a go-ahead motion, then followed Olvir out onto the road.
* * *
They went on in that fashion for three days and as many nights without exchanging more than a few whispered words at once. Quietly they exchanged watches, unpacked at dusk and packed at dawn, stopped at noon to eat and drink, and kept on walking. One night was cloudy. One day, a deer bounded across their path, but they didn’t bother trying to shoot it; it would take too long to dress or cook.
Such small features shaped the hours. Otherwise, there were only the forest, the creatures in the forest, and Vivian, all of whom remained constant.
The road began to slope upward as the days wore on. It shrank, too, though it never got as narrow as the game trail had been. The creatures that had cleared it had been smaller than elk or bear, but they’d built their works to last. They’d only mostly failed.
It was a gloomy notion, one that went well with the crumbling stones Olvir walked on and the hazy white sky above. People had planned the road, cleared the forest, laid the stones, then traveled it. That had lasted for hundreds of years and vanished in fewer than a dozen.
Criwath, Silane, all that people had managed to preserve and all that they’d managed to rebuild since then, could disappear in less time. If the spells Gerant and the others in the west had developed were very good, and if the armies facing Thyran held very successfully against the full strength of his forces, some pieces might remain, but Olvir knew that the losses would be great unless he succeeded.
He still didn’t know exactly what that would entail.
The dreams hadn’t returned.
It had been easier to walk without thinking on the first day, when their journey had just started and the camp had been close behind them. The immediate circumstances had been new enough to command all Olvir’s attention. Four days in, the wilderness had become normal. He stayed aware of all his surroundings, breathed as he’d been taught, but couldn’t keep his mind completely clear.
They went on, walking a road whose creators had likely never imagined its sad end: pitted and overgrown, no living people left in the places it had once connected, inhabited by animals, monsters, and a pair of desperate people. Long ago, its builders had acted with high hopes. Nothing they’d done had lasted in the end.
If the forces opposing Thyran won, would that last? Would whatever task he had to accomplish on the Battlefield let the world rest and mend its wounds in peace? Or would Olvir merely throw Thyran back to try another horrible trick? Might he clear the way for Gizath to bring forth an even worse champion?
