So they ate rations and drank water. Theydidn’tsit down. Olvir suspected that the ground probably couldn’t do more harm through cloth than it could through boot leather. “But that only makes my feet feel off,” he added when he said so aloud, wiggling his toes and grimacing.
“And we might as well not test it,” Vivian agreed after a mouthful of bread. “Isn’t that why you caught me?”
“I wouldn’t have wanted you to fall regardless.”
“The perfect knight,” she said with another smile. She clearly tried to keep grief out of that one.
“Far from it,” he replied and bled for her inwardly.
If the moment they were fearing did come, Olvir hoped maybe he could retain enough of his will to spare her the worst. He had his own sword and knife. It wouldn’t take long.
Try hard to stay yourself, he thought in the manner of Nahon lecturing an over-dramatic young knight,and you may both be spared, not to mention a number of others.
That was true. He wasn’t sure how to win that fight, though, save by watching himself closely for any hint that he might be acting out of the ordinary—and what was ordinary in such circumstances? It was trying to battle fog, and it became all the harder as they went farther into the Battlefield.
Their surroundings were still strange then. More distressingly, they began to feel familiar.
Chapter 37
Vivian had never met a knight with a talent for gambling. Serving the god of truth apparently left its mark, and Olvir was no exception. If she’d been closer when he pretended to consider the Twisted mage’s offer, or the wizard itself had been better at reading humans, there would have been no delay at all.
She knew it immediately when he was uneasy—or more uneasy than both of them had been since they’d crossed the border. When she asked, “Are you all right?” it was only because “What is it?” would have sounded too harsh.
“Fine in body,” Olvir said, brows knitted. “But…I’m beginning to recognize this place.”
That could further their goal, Vivian reminded herself. The whole situation reminded her of some of the field surgeons’ herbs or the Mourners’ power when an illness was grave. Healing lay cheek to cheek with death. She had no real ability to predict which direction this particular development pointed. “How do you mean?” she asked carefully. “Do you know where we’re going, the way I do? It isn’t as though there are landmarks.”
“There aren’t any longer. Or they’ve changed. Or…”
Olvir fell silent, but it was the expectant silence of thinking out what came next. Vivian waited, walking along cautiously even though the terrain had gone back to normal, for what its version of “normal” was worth. There’d be no warning sign before it became ice again—or fire or spikes, for that matter.
Eventually, Olvir gestured to a section of the Battlefield. To Vivian, it looked no different from the always-different world they were walking through: light blue one moment, black the next, eddying like a slow river. “There was a fruit tree there,” Olvir said. “Plums, or maybe pears. That’s not clear—but I know it was just in that spot and that lightning hit it once. It took off half the branches.”
She stared at the spot. No suggestion of a tree emerged.
I sense no such thing myself,said Ulamir,for what that may be worth.
“It’s not a landmark, really. I couldn’t tell you how to get here if we were a mile away or where to go from here. But…there are patterns, and they mark places. Or I see the shape of what was. I don’t… I wish I could put it into words better.”
“Do you remember being here? Or eating the fruit, climbing the tree, anything like that?”
“Not…quite. Or yes, a little.” Olvir looked like he would curse, if he’d been a cursing man. “I remember seeing it. But not seeing it on a particular day or what I was doing or felt. What he was doing or felt,” he hastily added.
The correction came as a relief. Vivian wasn’t sure what to make of the initial fault. It could be the sort of slip anyone could make when seeing visions, manifestation of the Sundered Soul or not, but she hadn’t met many prophets.
“Recognition, but no context,” Olvir went on, “except that it seems closer than if I’d seen a picture in a book. Not that there’d be one.” He made a face. “This is why I didn’t tell you right away. I was trying to figure out how to phrase it so that it made sense outside my head.”
“I can follow you so far,” said Vivian, feeling theright directionpull her onward and knowing that she could never have defined exactly what sense it used to do that.
She took in their surroundings, the soap-bubble shimmer and constantly changing motion. “Do you think you could change things here?” she asked and then made her own swift correction: “I’m not saying you should try!”
“I wouldn’t if you ordered me,” Olvir replied with an incredulous laugh.
In that we are all agreed,chimed in Ulamir.
Olvir walked in quiet contemplation for a few yards. “I suppose,” he eventually said, “that I could make things change. But I doubt I could direct the form those changes took except in a very rough sense, and maybe not that much.”
“You could pull a stick out of the tower and see if it crashes,” said Vivian, remembering games she’d played in her training. “That’s all?”
