“He vanished in green light. As Kanrath was gaping at the space where he’d gone, one of the trees that had just grown up spoke to him—but that, Ulamir says, is a story he hasn’t managed to put into human words yet.”
* * *
I would have brought you to the echoes if I could have, my Sentinel. They would have enjoyed your company.
“I’d have liked that too,” said Vivian, though she wouldn’t have given up her days with Olvir. Mostly, she wished that she’d had the capacity for one activity and the leisure for both.
“At least you can tell me some of what you heard,” she went on, “and maybe more after a while. Or when I’m not so encumbered by being alive.”
There is freedom in death, though I would not wish it on you so soon. It seems that you were happy, too, in my absence, and I’m glad of that.
Vivian felt what Ulamir was restraining himself from saying. She didn’t press him. Partnership—any friendship, in truth—was built at least in part on what either party could have said and didn’t. She and Ulamir had worked together for years. They knew the job they’d taken on, and there was no need for either to remind the other.
She peered down the endless staircase. No ornament adorned those walls, no shifts in stone marked different sections. All was blank. It was quiet, too, with the soft slide of her footsteps and Olvir’s and their paired breathing all the sound that traveled up and down the long passage. The world felt very far away and yet closer than it had when they’d been in the caves.
There was open sky on the other side. She trusted Ulamir on that point. Beyond that were plains and the Battlefield—and behind them was the forest and eventually the cities of the south and west, though those had stopped seeming real to Vivian months earlier.
Her thoughts turned to the camp, which nobody had ever tried to give a proper name, although she’d stayed there longer than she’d ever remained in one place since she’d been sixteen. Naming the fortifications would’ve made them seem too permanent, or maybe too important. Week by week, month by month, everybody at the camp had behaved—save for logistics—as though they’d be packing up the next day and heading back to their normal lives.
Had even that changed with the new assaults?
Katrine would be leading the Sentinels adeptly. She was level-headed, she lacked only a few years of experience compared to Vivian, and if her decisions weren’t always what Vivian’s would’ve been, they worked out as well on average and better sometimes. Vivian could’ve left the camp in no better hands.
Nonetheless, she wondered, and she worried. Had the animals Emeth used to scout received proper food and shelter, particularly if the storm had hit the camp? Were the soldiers and the knights working smoothly with Katrine? Magarteach and Nahon were good, reasonable sorts, but there were always differences in personality and command style, and those could widen under pressure.
Were all the front’s leaders still alive? Were any of them?
Vivian had been too tired through most of the journey to truly consider what might be happening behind her. Safety and rest had their drawbacks, especially when she followed them with travel through a monotonous tunnel. Another geisbar might actually have been a welcome change.
What had she said to Olvir? That she had to trust the ones she led and hope to hell she was justified in doing so. It wasn’t being wrong that worried her, though, but the possibilities where there was noright—and she couldn’t do a damn thing about them regardless.
Be easy,said Ulamir.You take a weight your shoulders were never meant for.
Everyone had done that lately.
Vivian listened to her sword-spirit, though, and then to the steady sound of Olvir’s breath behind her. She kept walking, head bent, leaning slightly forward, because that was the thing that did lie within her power just then.
And after a while, there was cold air against her face. After a few steps more, there was light, pale and dim but unmistakably present.
The mountain opened in front of them.
Chapter 29
The light was dazzling. Vivian blinked several times—for the same reason that she could see in the dark, she weathered the transition from dark to light faster than normal mortals did, but it still took a moment—and began to make out the landscape in front of her.
We have come to an exceedingly flat place, observed Ulamir.
They certainly had. The ground stretched off with no hill in sight, broken by occasional dark plants somewhere between shrubs and trees in height and as wide as they were tall. Snow covered their tops and the ground, but it was already melting as the weather escaped Thyran’s constraints and nudged on toward late spring.
The last storm had been more than a week before, and Vivian and Olvir had come a long way from the border camp. Vivian couldn’t tell whether the air was taking longer to warm up than it normally would. She supposed there was no point in trying to figure it out. Thyran was sending the storms. Eventually, unless he was stopped, they’d build up enough force to tip the larger balance of the weather, and the endless winters would come again.
It would have been nice to figure out how long they had, all the same.
“Well,” said Olvir, who’d straightened up with an almost audible click of his spine, “it’s a nice change to be on level ground.”
Vivian turned her thoughts away from pointless melancholy, letting the tall man beside her lead her toward cheer even if he wasn’t aware that he was doing so. “There’s that,” she agreed. “It’d be wonderful land if I had a good horse. You could ride for hours out here, as fast as the beast would go. Assuming there are no rabbit holes.”
Olvir laid a palm against his stomach. “Oh, I wouldn’t mind a rabbit or two.”
