That was, in Olvir’s experience, generally how scars worked.
* * *
The knight sends no influence forth to this place that I can sense,Ulamir said,but that may only mean I can’t sense it. I have my limitations, and I would believe them strongest here. Existence may shape itself readily to his will or may resist his presence even more strongly than it does ours.
He was right. As he’d reminded Vivian earlier, two gods had created the Battlefield. The remnants of Letar’s power could be decidedly hostile to any contact from Her brother. For that matter, the echoes of Gizath once he’d turned traitor might not feel very pleasant about a reminder of the piece of himself he’d cast aside.
Whichever was the case, Vivian couldn’t tell from their journey.
The footing of the Battlefield was never certain, the smell was unusual—not bad, exactly, where Vivian was concerned, but she liked the scent of a forge—and the sight sickening, though not in the typical sense that people used the term.
There were no entrail-draped trees or rivers of bodily fluids littering the landscape. In the abstract, the colors were actually quite pretty. They never stayed still, though, and they never moved along predictable routes. Usually their motion wasn’t even sensical—if Vivian had tried to describe it, she would’ve ended up using phrases such as “left, but a little north” or “down, and sort of outward.”
She’d never been seasick, but after an hour treading cautiously through the swirling hues of the Battlefield, she’d completely stopped regretting their lack of fresh food.
Vivian’s blessing didn’t help either. It wasuseful, no doubt—the sense of destination never wavered, and gods knew she and Olvir wouldn’t have had consistent landmarks to go by—but the conflict between it and the terrain made her stomach churn. Before long, a band of pressure was tightening from Vivian’s brow to the base of her skull.
She breathed deeply, swallowed hard, and walked on.
Olvir glanced over at her every so often, grave with worry. “I don’t want to break your concentration,” he finally said, “but you’re clearly not well. Can it be helped?”
“Not until we get out of here, but thank you. I’ll live. I’ve certainly felt worse.”
That was true. Vivian had never felt moreill, but there was no point splitting hairs.
“I’d say you should lean on me, but if we’re attacked—”
“Bad idea. No, I’ll be fine.”
Finewas extremely subjective just then, but neither of them needed to state the fact. There was no option except to press on, trying their hardest to ignore their surroundings.
Before they’d been walking much longer, Vivian stopped being able to tell how long they’d been walking. Outside of the Battlefield, she could generally judge by how tired she was or how sore her muscles had gotten, even when the sun and stars provided no clues. The throbbing pain in her temples skewed that estimation. So did the effort of keeping her footing on the ever-changing ground. Nothing about the Battlefield resembled the world outside—not initially.
The first exception was a song: quick, cheerful, the words in the stonekin’s language, the voice a clear tenor. It didn’t sound at all like Olvir, but Vivian glanced at him simply because nobody else was present. He stared back, as puzzled as she was.
When Vivian turned toward the direction she thought the song came from, its origin shifted to a point a little behind her right shoulder. She spun toward the new origin, and it shifted again. The merry verses continued with no pause.
“Do you hear somebody singing?” she asked and hummed a bit of the tune. The Battlefield was strange enough that music for her could have been screaming for Olvir.
But he nodded and pointed behind his right shoulder. “From there, for me.”
“Do you understand any of the… Oh, you’re a knight. What does it say?”
He stood and listened, a calm figure amid the dazzling lights. “It’s about roads. The verses are how they change with the seasons, and there’s a subtle shift with the chorus, too, but it’d sound awkward if I translated it.”
“A clue?”
“I don’t think so. Just…celebration. High spirits.”
An echo, Ulamir said.Or likely so.
“Veryon?” Vivian thought of the most famous stonekin, tragic as that fame was.
“Or one of his friends. I don’t—” Olvir frowned. “I don’tbelievethere’s actually a soul behind it any longer.”
“Ulamir agrees.”
Olvir hesitated. “In case we’re wrong,” he said and turned to bow to the empty air behind him. “Thank you for the music, and I hope you’ve found peace.”
