Page 121 of Beds and Blades

It was past dawn. More than six hours.

Skip felt present and focused, the High Commander in the middle of his morning.

His emotions carried strain. He knew.

I looked at the eastern gate.

“She is going to come back,” he said. He said it like he was attempting to convince himself.

“Yes,” I said.

Then the eastern gate opened.

Varia came through alone. On foot.

Her horse was not with her.

Her armor had the damage pattern of real sustained engagement. The dents and deformations of the metal conveyed that her armor had been hit hard by something fast and powerful. There was blood on the steel. Some of it was dried and dark.

She was pale. The olive warmth of her skin was gone.

She was still on her feet. Still conscious. Driving herself forward with the hard, narrowing focus of someone who had decided on the gate and meant to reach it, no matter the cost. Sweat streamed down her, as though her body were fighting off some brutal illness.

Gaius, two garrison soldiers, and I reached her at the same time.

She let us take her weight.

“The village of Nema,” she said.

Her voice was wrong. Not weak. Just wrong.

“They were waiting. More than the signal. The others…”

“The others are gone,” she said. “The Vanguard. Dead. I slew the remaining undead. Three confirmed down. The village is clear.”

She paused, and something in the pause was wrong. It was too measured, too final. It sounded like she had rehearsed the sequence rather than lived it.

“I am the only one who survived.”

She was reporting. That was what I registered before anything else. Not the words. The register. The flat, operational cadence of a soldier giving an account. Whatever she had been through in that field, whatever had happened to the soldiers she had taken with her, the first thing she did when she came through the gate was report.

“Don’t continue,” I said. “Infirmary.”

Something was wrong with her eyes. They were still blue, but the color seemed washed thin, as though the cold had leached something out of them. Around each pupil, a faint amber ring appeared when the light caught it and vanished again when she moved.

“Infirmary,” I said. “Now.”

***

Caen was there when we brought her in. The pendant brightened the moment Varia crossed the threshold. It was not the warm blue of active healing but something more careful.

Caen looked at Varia. Then she looked at me. Something passed between us in that look that neither of us put into words.

Later—much later, after everything—I would come to believe that Caen had made a choice in that moment. She had allocated her limited magic to healing rather than to unraveling the truth.

I did not blame her for it. I understood it.

Caen chose to believe that the wounds were the whole story. She began to work.