Page 85 of Beds and Blades

“My mother was once a soldier, before she settled down to have a family. It was not a choice that required much deliberation.”

“You grew up with this,” I said.

“I grew up inside it,” she said.

“I came to Scipio’s garrison four years ago. I had served elsewhere before. Places that were smaller. Commands that were—less.”

Less. I knew exactly what she meant.

“Skip runs a different kind of garrison,” I said.

“He sees his people,” she said. “All of us. You do not know how rare that is until you served under men who do not.”

We sat with that for a moment. The drill in the far corner. The cold water. The leather sat slightly loose on my frame.

“Does it get easier?” I asked. “The war. The line. Year after year of the same thing.”

Varia considered this with the genuine attention she gave to genuine questions. She looked at the garrison—the soldiers in the yard, at the walls, at the Zhaduun Mountains visible beyond the eastern gate. All of it.

“No,” she said. “It does not get easier. But it gets clearer.” She drank. “You understand what you are doing and why. You stop asking whether it is worth it.”

“And what are you doing?” I asked. “What is the thing you understand?”

“We burn against the darkness. That’s what this garrison is. That’s what the line is.” She turned the flask once in her hand before sealing it. “It isn’t complicated. It’s just the truth.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then, in the flat tone of someone stating a fact they had long stopped being angry about, she said, “Newardia sent half our requested reinforcements last rotation. The dispatch before that, a third. The supply chain runs six weeks behind schedule in winter.”

She looked at the mountains.

“They declared victory forty years ago. They went home. They built the outpost line and staffed it, and they tell themselves the problem is contained.”

She sighed.

“They are not wrong. The problem is contained. What they do not think about is who is doing the containing, or what it costs. They do not think about how long the people doing it are out here, fighting to hold back this threat. We do not hold this line because Newardia is watching. We hold it because if we don’t, those villages burn. That is the whole calculation.”

She sealed the flask.

“We hold the line. Not for glory. Not for recognition. Not because anyone in Newardia is going to remember our names.”

Her eyes went to the soldiers running drills in the cold, to the walls that had been absorbing assault for decades.

Her chin lifted slightly.

“There are many people who sleep through the night because this line holds.”

She let that sit, simple as the rest.

“It is for them.”

“We burn against the darkness,” I said, turning the words over, feeling their weight.

I glanced past the yard, as if I might see what lay beyond it, though there was nothing but distance.

I looked back at her.

“There’s something in that. The idea that it doesn’t have to drive the dark away everywhere. Only here. Only enough.”

I looked at her. At the blue eyes and the sharp face and the dark hair loose in the morning air. At the woman who had been inside this war since she was sixteen and had arrived at a settled understanding of what she was doing in it.