How could he even tell which way my eyes were cast? That familiar old sting of defiance rose in me; I couldn’t help myself. “But they won’t come from the plains, Regiment Commander. They’ll come from the trees.”
A snicker sounded from my right. Theo, always eager to witness trouble.
The regiment commander’s voice came again, now deep with gravel. “Can you see the trees by night, Waters?”
“No, Regiment Commander.”
“You’ll see neither plains nor trees with your eyes on the commander’s tower,” Theo’s voice rang out.
I shot him a lethal glance over my shoulder. He stood straighter than I’d ever seen him over at the next battlement, red hair blazing in the slant light. His guard’s pin—three interlocking circles—glinted on his breast. “And what ofyoureyes?”
“Shut up, greenhorns.” The regiment commander’s voice was loud enough that we could hear him up and down the walkway atop the southernmost wall. “Eurydice Waters, though she’s chewy as an unripe grapefruit, is right. Regiment, you know your work: eyes on the plains, if you want to keep your people alive.”
I’d never even tasted a grapefruit.
Chewy. Unripe. And yet it was us greenhorns assigned to the watchposts. How did the people of our kingdom sleep gently in their beds knowing their lives were underTheo’s care? And I a woman, no less—meant for baking bread, for millingwheat, never for guarding. Yet I’d persisted, so they’d trained me for three months to stand here.
If anything ever emerged from those trees, we were fucked.
When I turned back to the evergreens, the sun had fallen. Only the pink pastel sky remained, the grayness of dusk sliding over our heads toward it.
Gone.
I shifted in my leathers. Within minutes the night winds had come, the air cooling as though the goddess Caelara breathed over us. The only light came from within and atop our walls, as the torchbearer came around to illuminate each battlement’s torch. Soon, firelight flared beside me and for as far along the wall as I could see.
Beyond that, darkness. An ink so deep and full the trees might have been enveloped in a pot of black paint.
Now it was only to wait forthem,should they ever decide to return.
Whole religions had spawned around the hope that they would not. Sometimes, awoken by a noise as a child and clutching my blanket, I had seen fit to pray to two or three deities. Arxius, the wallfather. Vaelen, the bleeding sky. Caelara, the nightmother. None had answered. Or maybe they had, which was why I stood here tonight.
The trembling of my knees was because of the wind, that was all. I wasn’t used to standing up here, unmoving for hours. When the sun set, that was when I used to creep back down the circular stone steps toward the safety within the walls. I would walk and run and jog and peek into alleys on my way back home, thinking all the while of the marvelous guard standing on the wall.
They had seemed so large, so unyielding, like statues against the night. Perhaps more so because no one had ever called me anything except “small” or “fragile”—the two worst traits you could possess in our kingdom.
Anything but small and fragile. Anything.
You could be ground down under “small” and “fragile.” You could be riven to dust before you were old enough to be useful. Ihated those two words; I would dig each of their graves and bury them under six feet of fresh dirt, if I could.
Maybe that was why I’d forced my way into the guard—that a child might see me standing here in my leathers, with my bow and quiver and scabbard, and think me something other than small and fragile.
Or maybe so that the childIhad been might think so.
I straightened. The regiment commander had come down from the tower and begun his patrol along the wall, boots tapping behind me with his second-in-command alongside. Within a minute they were past me, and I was left to my post.
I stared into the blackness below. I stared and stared until my vision swam with spots and my hearing became attuned to the smallest of sounds—the crackle of torchfire, the occasional shifting of leathers and metal.
Eyes on the plains.
But in the darkness, the plains were as invisible to me as everything else.
Two hours in, Theo said from my right, his voice low, “You don’t have to stand the whole night, Waters.”
I glanced his way; down the wall he was seated with his legs dangling off the edge. His orange hair was restless in the firelight, flaring and dimming as though it too were made of flames.
“Fuck off, Theo.” I shifted my weight onto my less achy foot. “Eyes on the plains, right?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve been holding that bitterness for the past hour. It’s not healthy, you know. Just swallow.”
