A shudder ripped through her.
She stopped, staring hard at Vaneshta. “I’m not a coward. I am not going to abandon the team.”
“I know, but teams need to work together. Need to have each other’s backs.”
Iryana wobbled. She couldn’t have this conversation now.
“If the captain is fine with me being on the team, then just. Just—” She shivered. “We don’t all have to get along. It’s okay if we aren’t tied at the hip. I’ll do the job. Okay?”
“The captain doesn’t—” Vaneshta cut off with a loud sigh.
“It’s fine, okay?” And Iryana took off running. Sheneededto be alone.
“Iryana!”
She didn’t stop for Vaneshta, couldn’t.
The world was closing in on her, vision swirling with dark spots. She needed to be alone. To get somewhere she couldbreatheagain.
Sweat glued Iryana’s shirt to her back despite the chilly spring air. She only wore her chest armor, a compromise between protection and the exertion. She would have preferred to remove the armor entirely, but it wasn’t safe enough outside the walls.
After her run that morning, Iryana had been pulled into a group of various soldiers to work on the defenses outside the fortress walls, repairing the damagefrom dakii and the mud season. It was hard work, but she welcomed the reprieve from her team.
Up close, the spikes and trenches smelled of stagnant water and the traces of inky black blood that pooled in them. There were hints of damage from the last attack on the walls about a week earlier. Iryana had been on a mission at the time and missed the excitement. There was almost always something going on at the fort; a team dragging injured or dead soldiers back, a squad sent out to protect a settlement beset by dakii, or a guarded caravan passing through. She mostly tried to keep her head down and focus on what was relevant to her.
A few soldiers, fully armed, patrolled the edges of where she and a dozen other soldiers worked. The only other soldier she knew was Pyetar.
Since the failed exercise two nights earlier, things with her team had been awkward. Working through forms and sparring together had been tense, and the mood during their patrol yesterday was stifled. Iryana had followed every order, stayed alert and focused, everything she could to show she wouldn’t let them down. When they ran into a small pack of dakii, Iryana rained arrows down on them, but it didn’t feel like much of a victory as they silently marched back to the fort.
At least no one mentioned how Iryana had run off the night before.
And it would be moonless that evening, time to face her sister the next evening. She dreaded it.
Iryana slammed the butt of a new spike into the hole she had dug, her arms aching from hauling the sharpened timbers. Her gloves were torn, blisters already forming on her palms, but she didn’t complain as she hammered the spike into place with a half-rotted mallet. The barely-thawed soil didn’t make it easy.
Pyetar was working two rows ahead of her, sleeves rolled to his elbows as he worked with mechanical efficiency. Digging cracked and splintered spikes out of the ground, replacing them, and hauling the old ones away to be chopped into firewood. His arms were corded with muscles beneath the splatters of mud.
He hadn’t said a word to her all afternoon, but she’d felt his presence in her chest. He’d threatened her family, roughed up her cousin, crippled a man for a minor offense. And he was one more person that knew she didn’t belong.
She hated him.
“This one could probably use replacing too.” Pyetar patted one of the spikes further down her row as he walked past.
Iryana bristled. “I haven’t gotten there yet.”
He shrugged and kept walking as she glared at the back of his head.
She took a short break, wiping a bead of sweat off her brow and taking long gulps of cool, sweet water. Pyetar looked back at her, and she narrowed her eyes, quickly getting back to work. She wouldn’t give him any more reason to doubt her if she could help it.
Then a horn blew high up on the wall, carrying over them.
She froze.
All around her, soldiers stilled.
Her gaze focused along the tree line, searching for what had alerted the watch. Then she saw blue-gray fur and sharp, black horns as dakii burst out of the forest. One of the younger soldiers near the front screamed and fell backwards into the trench. Soldiers dropped their hammers and spikes, metal-forged weapons forming in their hands. The soldiers that had been guarding them rushed forward to form a line midway between the spikes, but the others didn’t seem to know what they were meant to do. The soldiers at the front raced to get behind the line.
It was chaos.
