The grip on her arse tightened. “You’re right,” said Olvir, “and you’re cruel.”
“I don’t have to be,” she said sincerely, wondering if she’d gone too far. “Just let me know and I’ll contain myself.”
He kissed her in answer, quick but thorough. “Never.”
Chapter 15
“It looks very small from here, doesn’t it?”
Two days’ journey from the edge of the forest, the path wound up around the foot of the Serpentspine. The land was starting to fall away sharply in angles of dark-green grass and blue stone, but Olvir hadn’t realized how high they were or how far they’d gotten until they rounded a twisting bend that brought them practically in a circle.
The world below was fuzzier than it would have been on a map, where trees were neat clumps of circles if they were so abundant as to show up at all and nobody bothered adding stones or animal tracks, but the outlines were quite clear. The scrubland stretched pale brown between the forest and the mountains, and the woods beyond it were almost black in the morning light. At the edge of those woods, near the horizon, Olvir could barely spot a trail of smoke rising into the air. That was the camp: the palisade of bare wood and stone that had been his entire life for six months. He almost believed he could smell the cooking fires or hear the soldiers calling to one another.
Vivian glanced where he pointed. “Extremely,” she said, with a quiet, wry laugh. “There’s a moral lesson of some sort there, I’m certain. The insignificance of humanity, maybe. Of Thyran and his creatures too. Except that the storms would blight all the forest and its creatures pretty thoroughly, too, as they did when Thyran first summoned them.”
“Not forever,” said Olvir, following her as they picked their way along the rocky trail. “At least, those storms didn’t last. Now…”
“Now,” Vivian agreed, sounding grim.
“I want to imagine,” said Olvir, feeling something stuck within his mind begin to turn, though he couldn’t have said what, “that at the worst, part of the world would survive. Or the gods would remake it. If what Thyran does damages creation worse than their presence would, they’ll step in—but I’ll grant that’s not a line I’d ever want to cross!”
Vivian’s shoulders, which had begun to stiffen, relaxed when Olvir added the last statement. “That’s logical enough,” she said slowly, “though I admit I’d never given it very much consideration.”
“There hasn’t been space for the long view, these past few months. It probably wouldn’t have occurred to me either, but places like this can help take me out of myself.”
“Riding does that for me,” Vivian said. “Even when I was headed to a mission, the ride would leave me calmer, clear my thinking. Paying attention to another creature keeps my thoughts from turning inward too much.”
“No wonder you commanded aptly.”
“Flattery is a wonderful quality. And…hmm.” She walked a short distance onward before continuing, her feet making methodical crunching sounds on the rock.
Those sounds didn’t matter anymore, just as their talking didn’t. The path wound, but without turns that any foe could have used for an ambush, the view below them was clear, and the mountain face was too stark for most things to come straight down. Both Olvir and Vivian glanced up regularly regardless—Thyran did have flying creatures, he could have beasts that could climb like insects, and stories did say there’d been dragons on the other side of the mountains—but silence was no longer essential.
They did keep watches at night, much to their mutual frustration. Given the circumstances, it would have been foolishness—perhaps lethal foolishness—to be distracted for a quick tumble. Olvir kept reminding himself of that, especially when he was walking behind Vivian.
“I think that probably did help,” she said. “Not that I’d say I always made the best decisions, but having to make them, and new ones each day, and be aware of how my Sentinels were bearing up… I suspect I did reason better, in general, than I would have if I’d been on my own.”
“My mother favored singing for that. The last I heard, she was still leading the choir in her temple.” Olvir gazed over the edge again, thinking about the land beyond the horizon and a large gray-haired woman in blue, with a grip like iron and a talent with bread. The two went together, Edda’d said once: a life of swordplay translated well to kneading dough. “I used to joke that she’d taken me in in the hopes of getting a baritone one day.”
“Foresightful woman, unless your singing voice is higher than your speaking.”
“Oh, no. Until the war, she had me come back for the spring festival so I could take Poram’s part, despite my knighthood. She said there was nobody else in the village who could do it without invoking the god’s wrath.”
Vivian’s head tilted back a little when she laughed again, her dark, curly hair brushing the collar of her shirt. “I’m sure Tinival doesn’t mind you giving his father a bit of assistance now and then,” she said. “Family, eh?”
“Family,” he agreed and then remembered who he was speaking to. Sentinels were generally drawn from foundlings, bastards, and other unwanted children. He and Vivian had never gotten around to speaking much about their childhoods when they’d worked together before the war: they’d talked about their travel or the people they were dealing with and swapped jokes or stories. They’d never consciously avoided the past—or Olvir hadn’t—but it had never come up. “If it’s a sore spot,” he added, “I’m happy to change the subject.”
“Not at all. Even the Sentinels who don’t know theirs are usually all right with it by my age.”
“And,” he asked, cautious but encouraged by the fact that she’d mentioned the subject, “you do?”
“Mm-hmm.” Vivian took a swig of water from her flask, then slipped it back onto her belt. “I didn’t enter the Order until I was nine. The crops failed that year, in spite of all Sitha’s priests could do, and I was the fourth child. Sending me to the Sentinels meant we all survived.”
Olvir nodded. There’d been years of that sort in his own village. Children were a gamble. Grown, they were a blessing in old age, but too many young ones could be an unlucky family’s undoing. “You must’ve caught up with the training quickly.”
“Fairly. Some of the others have better reflexes than I do, but”—she shrugged—“I can see how normal people work, at times, in ways they can’t. It evens out.”
* * *
