The trail bent again as they went upward, carrying them away from the view of the forest and the camp. Vivian could see flashing glints in the distance. Memory, as well as maps, told her that they came from the sun shining off the edge of the western ocean, dancing and shifting as the waves rippled. Between her and the sea were flat plains, pale green with spring, where the broad Natarian River wound across the land. Small red forms moved over it in bunches: herds of the volqui that both grazed and hunted there.
She’d wanted one of them when she was a girl, inspired by stories about the stonekin riding them into battle. Her oldest sister had stopped her attempt to use their mother’s red dye on their patient brown draft horse. Vivian herself had reconsidered her idea to add horns to the incongruously named Cricket: even that placid brick of a mare had seemed likely to object.
That had been long ago, in days she rarely thought of any longer except when she visited.
Funny that talking to Olvir had brought it up. He’d been the only person outside the Order to ask if she minded the subject. Sentinels didn’t generally get the impulse to talk of family, since most didn’t have them. Other people generally chattered blithely about theirs, though Amris, in the few weeks she’d known him, had been reticent.
Home is a vanished place for him too,said Ulamir.
“Home becomes a vanished place for everyone, in time,” she said. “That just happens earlier for some of us than others. And more comprehensively.”
Olvir, behind her, made an affirmative noise. “Nobody can go back to what they had as children,” he said, “but I have a person and a place at least. I realize I’m very lucky.”
“So am I,” said Vivian. In the ensuing silence, she felt his search for the most polite form of the question and elaborated. “My mother went beyond the Veil a few years ago. My sibling Calyn went into the army—not posted with us, thank the gods; I don’t want to fight alongside a person who remembers me in diapers—but my father’s alive, and my brother runs most of the farm now, with his…let’s say ‘supervision.’ My sister’s a blacksmith in the village. I visit every so often, when I have the leisure between missions.”
“I always wanted siblings,” said Olvir. “The knighthood helped a little in that regard, but it wasn’t like what I saw from the village families. It wasn’t worse, but…not the same. Maybe it was that we all were half-grown already when we joined.”
“It could be, but the Order takes us young mostly, and it’s not the same. With siblings, there’s more, oh…” She considered the best phrasing for it while the plains grew remote below them and the view expanded. The blue rim of the ocean was starting to be visible now. “Working out your place by wanting different things or being good at different things. Significant differences, not just your blessings or whether you’re better with a bow than a spear.”
“A shirt can be red or blue, but it’s still a shirt, not a cloak.”
“Right. Which I suppose makes the knighthood and the Order clothes chests.” Vivian grinned into the thinning air of the mountain.
“Or tailors.”
Calling the Reforging the Hemming would meet with little approval, I suspect.
That made Vivian snicker. Olvir laughed, too, when she explained it. Even though he was quiet, the sound rang merrily in the heights.
“But,” he said afterward, “the Order does seem different. It takes you younger, it shapes you more. A priesthood’s a vocation, but it’s one you choose as a youth, as you’d choose an apprenticeship.”
Vivian had heard similar sentiments in different tones. Then she’d taken the speaker apart, verbally, with icy precision or kept surly silence in the name of duty. Olvir didn’t demand answers or insist that she justify the Order. He just sounded as if he was thinking things through.
She liked that. When he added, “I know I speak from the outside. I probably get half of it wrong,” she liked it even more.
“No,” she replied, “no, not completely. We do choose, in the end.” Ties remained—the Order had members across the known lands who’d declined the Reforging but sent reports or waited for orders—but there was volition, as much as there could be in those raised to a task. “But there’s a reason it’s Reforging with us, not… What is it you have?”
“The ceremony’s merely a dedication. Well, I say ‘merely’…” Vivian could imagine Olvir’s smile. “I doubt there’s any among us who couldn’t remember every detail of theirs. It does give Tinival permission to use us as he wills. There’s some training for that too. For how to handle it.”
“Right. You survive if you haven’t done anything egregiously wrong. It’s not a matter of what you can physically or mentally endure.”
Vivian had fallen through fire during hers, or that was how she recalled it. Fire, then ice, with great eyes watching from places she couldn’t quite focus on. She’d known every inch of herself, each bruise or scratch she’d ever taken, before the ordeal had concluded. The Adeptas had said she’d spent four days in the chamber. It hadn’t been a record.
“We trust that the trainees know their limits,” she said, “or that the Adeptas will spot the ones who don’t long before the choice comes up. You have to let people take on their own pain.”
“How can you be sure that they make the choice freely?”
“We try as best we can. It’s probably not sufficient always, especially not for the foundlings.” Vivian watched the path ahead of her, the gray scree that could turn an ankle. “A few of them do turn away at the end, if that proves a point. Otherwise…we need to exist, we need to be the creatures we are, so we make compromises. Gods willing, they’re not the wrong ones.”
Chapter 16
Near sunset of that day, Vivian began to feel her secondary gift.
It was faint, as she’d expected so far from her goal and with the path mostly clear, but she could feel the pressure: she imagined it was like the rein against a horse’s neck, not pulling but guiding. The sensation urged her broadly forward and a touch to the left, which was nothing that she hadn’t known already. Still, it was good to know her gift was working. Vivian suspected they’d need it badly on the other side of the mountains, since there were no maps to the Battlefield or of the ground within it.
One thought led to another. She glanced backward at Olvir.
He was striding along steadily behind her, a light sheen of sweat on his face, although the air was cool. They were halfway up the mountain, nearly to the point where the maps theydidhave said they should find a pass. The angle was sharp, hard work even for the two of them.
