Page 110 of Beds and Blades

Skip believed the soldiers standing on the walls should occasionally see their commander standing beside them. He had explained it to me once in the war room, in the straightforward way he reserved for things that mattered.

“A commander who never stands the watch eventually becomes a commander whose soldiers notice he never stood it.”

In Ely, where people trusted each other with their lives every night, that difference mattered.

I respected this about him. I also found it, on the nights it happened, extremely inconvenient.

I had tried to sleep. The bed was warm, and the fire was Skip’s work, and the room held the heat correctly. None of this was sufficient.

His alertness arrived at steady intervals. I felt him on watch, attention moving intensely along the wall.

His alertness made sleep nearly impossible. I tried taking moonroot, but even that could only quiet my body. It could not soften the hard, bright edge of Skip’s vigilance.

I got up.

I dressed in the leather, the outfit that fit now, with the shoulder guards at the correct width and the body pulling taut across muscle in a way it had not in the fall. Over it, I pulled on a heavy wool surcoat lined at the collar and cuffs with fur, its weight settling warmly around me without restricting movement.

I laced the boots. I set the sword at my belt and the hunter’s hook beside it.

I went for a walk.

The fortress at night was a different place from the fortress in the day. Quieter, though not entirely silent. The watch changed at the walls. The night kitchen remained open, producing a reduced version of its daytime meals for soldiers coming on and off rotation, while the low voices of people whose jobs existed in the dark carried through the corridors.

I took the stairs to the eastern wall.

***

The watchtower at the far eastern end of the wall was the highest point in the outpost, raised above the place where the land began its descent into the valley. Behind us, the villages stood on higher ground, safely beyond the line. From the tower, they were visible in the dark as clusters of firelight scattered across the uplands.

The light from inside reached the landing before I did. Two guards were at the observation post, their attention on the darkness beyond the wall. And leaning against the far rail, her dark hair loose and her breath visible in the cold air, was Varia.

She noticed me when I came up the stairs.

She did not look surprised.

“I could not sleep,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

“Scipio has the watch. The bond makes you alert when he is alert.”

She said it matter-of-factly. Claiming bonds were ordinary knowledge to her, including their less convenient practical effects.

I stood beside her at the rail and looked out at the dark.

The valley was white and still, its snow-covered floor undisturbed beneath the night sky. The Zhaduun Mountains rose beyond it in jagged layers of dark stone, their peaks cutting into the stars. At the summit of the highest mountain, Druvenfall stood like a crown of blades. Narrow windows burned red along its towers, too vivid and too steady to resemble ordinary fire, as though the mountain itself had opened its eyes. Below, where the snow gave way to the dark line of the forest, nothing moved.

I turned from the valley toward the uplands behind the fortress. Thin columns of smoke rose from the village chimneys—steady, vertical, undisturbed. Each one was a signal of ordinary life continuing. From this distance, they all looked at peace.

I watched the columns of smoke for a long time. They rose from hearth fires burning in the dark, from homes where families slept in the knowledge that the outpost line stood between them and the mountains.

I thought about Varia growing up in a village like one of those, learning from childhood that the smoke from her chimney could be seen from an outpost built to hold back the dark. She had grown up knowing what stood beyond the line. I had only just begun to understand it.

We stood in companionable quiet for a while. It was one of the things I had come to value most about Varia. Her silence carried no obligation. It did not ask to be filled. It had none of the strained texture of avoidance or discomfort. It was the silence of someone who had nothing to say and no need to pretend otherwise.

Then one of the guards said, “There.”

His voice was low and level.