* * *
“That bodes well,” Vivian said.
Putting the statue away, she handed Olvir a waterskin and sought the rations once again. She doled out slices of the mushrooms he’d found to each of them, in addition to their normal bread and dried cherries. If the fungi helped people go without water, Vivian reasoned, they must be generally good for somebody recovering from exertion, physical or otherwise—and they made a change.
He ate ravenously, too well mannered and well trained to simply bolt the food but clearly holding off the impulse only by will. Vivian, taking her time over her own dinner—or whatever meal it was—didn’t interrupt him with conversation.
“I’m sorry,” he said, mostly through, with a sheepish smile. “That was uncouth of me.”
“Just hungry. I’ve had a few moments of the sort myself. The first meal after my Reforging, I recall stuffing myself like a snake with an egg. Magic will do that. Even my greater blessing did, when I was new to invoking it.”
“Tinival’s gifts—” He paused and considered, the waterskin in one hand. “The greater ones, maybe. The rituals when a traitor trades information to be spared the worst of Letar’s punishments, for instance, but I haven’t led those. Hearing an oath or understanding languages never leave me worse off than usual.” Olvir chuckled. “Of course, I was sixteen when I started using those powers, and that’s an age when young men can eat their way through most of the world at a sitting anyhow, so it could be that I simply didn’t notice.”
“That hit me about when I started training,” Vivian said. “When I visited at feast days for a couple years, Calyn used to say our parents timed it nicely by getting me off their hands before my growth started, and the Order never would’ve taken me on if they’d known how much I’d cost in bread and meat. I told them they were just jealous because I’d end up taller than they were.”
“And did you?”
“Only by a finger’s breadth or two in the end. But I had most of my height before I was twelve, and they hadn’t particularly started growing at fifteen, so I had a weapon for a few years.”
Olvir swallowed a mouthful of water. “Weapon, hmm?”
“You’re always at war with your siblings a little, until you grow up and have your own lives. Even if you’re fond of each other in principle, you know each other too well, the others are always nearby, and one of you is always the reason why another can’t do or have exactly the thing they want. Mostly, you get over it when you hit eighteen or twenty.”
“The things I’ve missed.” He looked thoughtful as he finished off his piece of bread. “I wonder, was it similar for the gods? The three younger, that is?”
“I’ve never thought of that.” All the stories, all the books, all the liturgies and paintings and songs spoke of Letar, Gizath, and Tinival as siblings, but Vivian had never before considered what that actually might have meant. It had simply been a fact of the world. “I can’t imagine them being children, though.”
“No, nor Sitha or Poram being parents. They can be people-shaped when they want, but they’re not people, not really. I know that. But I’d think it must have taken a while to learn how the world works and what they could do with it or with each other.”
Vivian studied him. Sitting cross-legged on the rock floor, hands folded in his lap now that he’d finished eating, Olvir appeared weary but otherwise the same as he had as long as he and Vivian had been acquainted. His eyes were grave and serious, his expression purely curious. She didn’t suspect he was trying to argue any particular point.
All the same, she was careful to sound neutral when she replied. “It’s possible. Some aspects of it were probably more obvious than others, but I suppose it depends how quickly they learned and how much knowledge they entered with. And I have no idea about either.”
“I can’t think of anybody who could say. Maybe the high priests, if the knowledge hasn’t been lost. Or the elder peoples, the ones who lived then, but I’ve never heard of anybody that old coming into human lands.”
“Neither have I.” Most of the waterfolk and the stonekin had retreated to their own domains during the first round of Thyran’s storms, a century back. From what little Vivian had learned about the years before Thyran, the ancients among them had kept largely to their realms even then, and humans generally had struggled to reach those places.
Olvir stretched and got to his feet. “And I’m probably just being philosophical because I’d give my right eye for an archpriest of Poram to tell me what I was doing half an hour ago,” he said, adding quickly, “not that I would trade your company, you understand.”
“I have many uses,” Vivian said easily, “but weather magic isn’t one of them, and neither is communing with the gods. What you say makes it sound as though you figured matters out well enough.”
“I hope so. I saw what happened with the storm here but not what that may have done if another’s happening back on the lines, for instance, or whether I’ve given Thyran more to use in the future.”
“I wish I could set your mind at ease.” She rose, put an arm around Olvir, and leaned her head against his shoulder. It was no definite reassurance, no guarantee that his actions wouldn’t harm them or others, but it was within her power. “I’ve been there myself a few times in the last year or so. Nothing I’ve done has been as cosmic as your tasks, but with command…it seems like we’re always going forward half-blind in this war, and it’s never only our necks on the line.”
“That’s generally been how it works when I’ve led.” Olvir sounded as if the recollection cheered him, or at least steadied him. “There’s never any means of being sure, just doing what you can and trusting that the people you command know their business. It’s easier to trust the ones in charge of you. Or it was for me.”
“Simpler, certainly. Like working alone. We don’t even really get orders most of the time. The Adeptas send us notifications: there’s a monster here, probably, go do the needful. Or people seek us out directly if they’re sufficiently desperate.”
“I’m surprised you adapted so quickly.”
“Thank you,” she said and actually felt her cheeks heating a touch. “It comes down to trust again. In theory, I suppose I commanded the other Sentinels at the camp, but actually I just told them the situation for the most part. Occasionally I suggested that a particular blessing could be particularly handy midway through a battle or noticed when one of us had been on duty for too long at a stretch. Mostly I trusted them, as you say, and hoped like hell I didn’t get it wrong.”
Olvir nodded, the silky ends of his hair brushing against Vivian’s forehead. “Sleep helps with that, if you can manage it.” He was talking as much to himself as to her. “And thank the gods, that’s one thing I can definitely do at the moment.”
Chapter 27
Sleep was a deep, soft darkness, as it usually was after Olvir had been doing any sort of hard labor he wasn’t used to. He didn’t pass out the moment his head hit the pile of blankets, but he’d barely embraced Vivian when his eyelids dropped shut.
