Page 126 of Beds and Blades

I looked at Cato.

“You know this. You have studied that map longer than I have.”

Cato said nothing.

“The odds tonight are long,” I said. “I am not going to tell you otherwise. We are going into an established position in the dark against unknown numbers and we do not have the sun with us. Line Marshal Cato’s calculation is correct. Going in there is not the safe choice.”

I reached down and drew my sword. The sound of it leaving the scabbard was very clean in the cold air.

“I have been watching this garrison for four months, and safety is not what I have seen optimized for. I have seen something else.”

I looked at the faces in the torchlight.

“I have seen you stand in the dark against something that does not stop. You do this because the alternative is unacceptable. Because behind this wall, there are villages. Farms. Children. Those children are safe because of you. You stand between them and the darkness.”

I held the sword up.

I shouted at the top of my lungs.

“We burn against the darkness! That is what this garrison is! That is what the line is!”

Cato looked at the sword. He drew his own and raised it.

Across the courtyard, blades left their scabbards as one, the metallic sound filling the air. The garrison raised them.

I turned toward the gate.

The garrison followed.

Chapter twenty-two

Nema

Ahundred riders moved through the dark, their hooves breaking the crust of the snow and throwing it into the air behind us. We had kept the torches unlit to preserve what little stealth a hundred mounted soldiers could reasonably claim.

The moon was enough.

It was always enough in Mytharo. I had stopped finding its bright, craterless face strange sometime during my second month here.

It was also full. It was almost always full, which raised several questions about Mytharo’s lunar cycle that I had been meaning to ask Caen for three months.

Focus, Meghan Callahan.

I was galloping toward an enemy-held village to rescue the man I loved. Lunar mechanics could wait.

Cato rode beside me.

The road from Ely to Nema crossed land scattered with ancient stonework. Low walls sank beneath moss and grass. The foundations of vanished buildings appeared beside the road, their purpose long forgotten. They were older than the outpost line and older than Morvanna.

On Earth, I would have found them picturesque. Here, riding armed through the darkness, I found them melancholy.

Cato had not asked for my plan at the outpost, with the gate open and the entire garrison listening. That was discipline. Operational discussions had a place, and that place was not within earshot of every soldier expected to carry them out.

He waited until we were well clear.

“What’s your plan, Meghan?”

“New Carthage.”