Page 143 of Beds and Blades

We had been awake for most of the night, but hunger had returned with the blunt insistence of the body. The morning after a night engagement, the garrison fed itself with complete concentration.

I stepped through the doorway in leather that fit, the shoulder guards set to the proper width, my sword at one hip and the hunter’s hook at the other.

Someone started clapping. I never saw who.

The sound began at the far end of the hall and moved toward me. It was not organized or commanded. It spread the way genuine things spread, taken up by one person and then another until the entire room understood what was happening.

Soldiers lowered their cups. Spoons were set down. Benches scraped across stone as people stood. Some climbed onto the benches and tables, boots striking wood as the applause rose around them.

Then the cheering began. It filled the mess hall with a warm, gathering roar.

I stopped.

Four months ago, I had stood before five academics in a red sweater and worried that I might mishandle a presentation. Last night, I had stood on stone steps with a sword raised and reminded a garrison of what they already knew about themselves.

I had walked into a trap. I had found Skip. I had stood in a council hall beside the dead and spoken the truth to a woman I loved until, for one brief and impossible moment, she became herself again.

The garrison was not applauding because I had survived. They were applauding because I had stood with them.

For thirty years, I had met moments like this by stepping outside them. I observed. Categorized. Reduced feeling to information I could examine at a safe distance.

I did none of that now.

Somebody shouted my name, and then everyone was shouting it. My own name. Not Scipio's claimed woman, not the woman from another world. Just Meghan, two hundred voices strong.

My eyes filled in front of them, and I made no attempt whatsoever to manage the situation.

I stood in the doorway and let them give me what they had chosen to give. I let it reach me. All of it.

***

Three weeks later, I stood on the outpost wall.

Snow still covered the ground. Beyond it, the black mountains rose beneath a flat gray sky, their peaks lost in white.

At the summit stood Druvenfall. Morvanna’s castle. Once, it had been the seat of the sorcerer Zhor during the last great war.

Now it belonged to something no less dangerous.

Since Nema, I had stopped looking away.

The castle had not lost its power. What had changed was the nature of that power. It no longer filled me with the shapeless dread of something I could not understand. I had faced what lived beneath it. I had seen the dark bond at work. I knew what Morvanna was building in those mountains and what forty years of patience had produced.

The danger was greater than I had imagined. But it was no longer unknown.

The mountains were what they were. Morvanna was what she was. The dark bond, the command layer, the army gathering beyond the line. None of it had been defeated. None of it had been solved.

But it could be named. Mapped. Understood.

I looked directly at Druvenfall and saw a problem with a shape. Problems with shapes could be worked on.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs behind me.

Skip joined me on the wall. His arm settled around my shoulders with familiar certainty.

We looked toward the mountains.

“A scroll arrived this morning,” he said. “From the council in Newardia.”