Page 72 of Beds and Blades

The soldier did not hesitate again.

***

We stood in the courtyard while Mira burned on the pyre.

Skip’s arms were around me from behind, his chin at my temple, and we watched the pyre together without speaking. The moon was high and full—the Mytharo moon, smooth and crater-free in a way I still had not entirely adjusted to, hanging in a sky so dense with stars it looked like a painting.

I had been in this world for five days, and I still stopped when I saw that sky. I could not help it.

The heat of the pyre reached us where we stood. I was glad for the warmth.

“You never got to say goodbye,” I said.

“No.” He was quiet for a moment. “After a battle, we leave the fallen in the field. It is safer—they may turn. The protocol is decapitation. To prevent it.”

He stopped.

“I did not follow protocol with Mira. I knew the rule. I had given the order myself, more times than I can count. And I stood in that field with her, and I could not do it. I told myself she was already gone. I needed to believe she was already gone.”

He was silent long enough that I understood he was choosing the next words carefully.

“I was wrong. After years of following protocol, I failed to follow it with the one person for whom it mattered most.”

“What was she like?” I asked. “Before.”

A faint, painful fondness moved across his face.

“Stubborn,” he said. “The most stubborn soldier I ever commanded, which is saying something because I have commanded a great many stubborn soldiers. She had opinions about tactics, and she was not shy about them. Mira was usually right, which made the opinions harder to argue with.”

His voice roughened on her name, worn thin by years of repeating it only to himself.

“She laughed at the wrong moments. During briefings, sometimes. When something struck her as absurd. She could not help it, and she did not try very hard to. I realized that I was in love with her during a briefing. She laughed at something I said, and I looked at her, and that was the end of that.”

I held his arms where they crossed around me and said nothing. The fire crackled.

“She was a better soldier than she was a civilian,” he continued. “She did not know what to do with herself when there was nothing to defend.”

That was why he had blamed himself for missing it.

“You couldn’t have known,” I said.

“No,” he agreed. “But I have known it was not my fault for two years, and it has not helped as much as I expected it to.”

In the firelight, his face looked hollowed by relief. He had been carrying something for a very long time. Now he had set it down, and he was still deciding how to stand without it.

“She was a soldier first,” I said. “The best one you ever commanded. You told me that.”

His eyes closed briefly.

“That is how I will think of her,” I said. “If that is acceptable.”

He looked at me for a long moment. “It is acceptable,” he said quietly. “It is, in fact, exactly right.”

We stood with the fire until it burned lower.

“I loved her completely. I want you to know that. She deserved to be loved completely, and I did.”

“She knew how deeply you loved her. She also knew you believed she was gone,” I said. “That thing used that knowledge because it was the sharpest weapon it had. But she knew.”